An Overview on the Recycling of Lithium-Ion Batteries via Hydrometallurgical Method

During recent years recycling of lithium-ion batteries has attracted a lot of attention due to their extensive applications in various electric and electronic vehicles. Recycling of these batteries is of a great importance due to environmental issues and metal sources content, so this paper is to review the current status of these batteries’ recycling technologies. Among different recycling methods, hydrometallurgical based route is an optimized method to separate and recover metals and it has three steps as pre-treatment, leaching and deep recovery. In addition to brief description of these batteries’ structure and components, this paper has summarized the chemical, physical processes utilized in all steps of pre-treatment, leaching and metal recovery. Heat treatment, ultrasonic, dissolving and mechanical treatment are the common methods in the pre-treatment step and crystallization, solvent extraction, electrochemical and precipitation are accounted most used methods in the recovery step. Finally all investigations operated over the recycling issue also have been summarized in this paper. These categorized studies include both research and optimization into each triple step of hydrometallurgical route and new electrodes synthesis.