Simple and Eco-Friendly Fabrication of Electrode Materials and Their Performance in High-Voltage Lithium-Ion Batteries

Abstract

The huge consumption of rechargeable Li-ion batteries (LIBs) make it necessary to recover and reuse the different components of spent batteries, thus favoring sustainable development. Graphite is a critical material in the manufacture of the current LIBs so recycling it should be prioritized in the management of spent batteries. In this work, graphite is manually recovered from spent batteries used in smartphones. The impurities from the different components of the batteries are drastically reduced by simple leaching with HCl. This treatment significantly improves the delivered specific capacity, with average values of 300 and 390 mAh g−1 without and with leaching, respectively. To test recycled graphite as an anode material in real cells, it is paired with LiNi0.5Mn1.5O4, the most promising cathode material for high-voltage batteries. LiCl, produced directly by chlorination of spodumene, is used as the Li source to obtain the spinel sample. The real cell gives satisfactory values for both initial specific capacity (100 mAh g−1) and capacity retention after 100 cycles. These results are comparable to and in some cases even better than those for cells that use commercial graphite and conventional Li sources as primary raw materials. Moreover, the cell shows good performance during the rate capability test; the delivered capacity values decrease smoothly from 73 to 62 mAh g−1 while the rate increases from 0.1 to 1 C.