Will large-scale disassembly hinder power battery echelon use?

In recent years, with the rapid development of the new energy automotive industry, the power lithium battery industry is also actively expanding, and behind the expansion has also brought an increasingly obvious problem-how to recycle power batteries?

Scale dismantling becomes the "block stone" of power battery ladder utilization

It is estimated that the power battery will enter a large-scale end-of-life period in 2018. In 2016, China's sales of new energy vehicles reached 517,000, and sales in 2017 are estimated to be 700,000 to 800,000 vehicles. According to the service life of power batteries for 5 to 8 years, by 2020, the cumulative scrap volume of power batteries in China will reach 200,000 tons. With the promotion of new energy vehicles and the passage of time, the power recovery pressure will also increase.

In the "China Electric Vehicle Power Battery Series Technology Salon" that ended recently, Wangzidong, director of the National 863 Electric Vehicle Major Special Power Battery Test Center, explained to Battery China Network the difficulties of power battery recovery at present. "Because the battery forms, sizes, specifications, and packaging forms recovered by recycling companies are not uniform, it is difficult to achieve large-scale batch dismantling, and power battery recycling is facing a status quo that is difficult to achieve on a large scale," Wangzidong said.

Wangzidong believes that realizing large-scale dismantling is one of the ways to use low-cost echelons. He said that power cells can theoretically be recycled for echelon use, but there are no successful cases so far. The problem is the product structure design of power batteries.

Power cells for used vehicles are mainly batteries and modules. As the technical conditions for recycling are not yet ripe and research on recycling is still in its infancy, the separation of battery cells, including by cutting, is required in the treatment of disassembly power batteries and modules. However, in this process, it is very easy to cause battery spontaneous combustion or even explosion, causing major harm to the safety of personnel and equipment.

Landfill! The simple two words are the words that the conversation content of the technicians of Formosa Lithium Materials Technology Co., Ltd. left the battery China Network most impressed. According to related personnel, Formosa Plastics batteries are mainly lithium iron phosphate batteries, with related certification, can be landfill treatment.

The lack of recycling technology has led to unprecedented consistency in the treatment of lithium batteries, especially lithium iron phosphate batteries in the industry-only crushing and landfilling. In the communication with enterprises, battery China network learned that many domestic enterprises in lithium power recovery is equally inadequate.

Shuangdeng Group technical staff said that Shuangdeng is also trying to recycle lithium batteries. The recovered batteries need to be dismantled, screened, etc., and the labor costs, purchase fees, and restructuring fees generated are all compressing the profit margin of the enterprise. In the face of huge workload, companies are powerless.

Compared with the simple treatment of lithium iron phosphate batteries, the methods of triplet lithium ion batteries are slightly diversified. The treatment methods for the recovery of lithium ion batteries in the European Union include: pyrolysis-wet separation and purification, pyrolysis-wet purification, fragmentation-pyrolysis-distillation-pyrolysis, etc., and the treatment of cobalt, nickel, copper, and copper in the recovered batteries through the above methods. Zinc, Mercury, etc. And it is used as a raw material many times. A small number of lithium power recovery enterprises in China use roasting(pyrolysis) pretreatment-mechanical dismantling, physical separation-wet smelting and other processes for recycling.

On a global scale, companies choose different treatment methods for the recovery of ternary batteries based on different materials. There are no clear treatment criteria for which method to recycle, which materials must be recycled, and how much recovery rate to reach.

According to battery China Network, at present, lithium power recycling in China is generally dominated by lithium power production enterprises. Because the company has a good understanding of the battery, it can also better recycle the battery. However, the recycling technology of waste batteries is complex, the process is relatively long, and there is no mature dismantling equipment manufacturer in the industry. Therefore, there are still certain bottlenecks in the large-scale dismantling of power batteries.

Taking Formosa Plastics as an example, it will grade the recycled lithium iron phosphate batteries, and the batteries that can not be reused will end the "journey" in the form of "landfill". The batteries that can be used step by step will be installed in Formosa's self-produced cleaning machine. Or solar cell car. However, on the whole, the profit space for ladder utilization is not obvious.

Wangzidong said that during the manufacturing process, many companies used laser welding and other techniques to connect the cells or use bolt fastening to firmly fix the cells in order to improve the reliability of the battery pack. Although the reliability of the battery pack has been improved, it has increased the difficulty of cell ladder utilization. The dismantling process is cumbersome and time-consuming, and it also hinders the reuse of used power cells.

In the global scope, the recycling of power lithium batteries has just started, but due to the rapid development of the new energy automotive industry, recycling work has been at a critical juncture. Battery China Network believes that in order to better realize the "low pollution and low energy consumption" recovery and echelon utilization of power batteries, power battery manufacturers should be forward-looking in the structure design of battery products and facilitate the dismantling and screening of recycling stages. And more efforts should be made in battery materials and processes to reduce the adverse effects on the environment during the later dismantling process.

The page contains the contents of the machine translation.