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Spray drying–assisted recycling of spent LiFePO4 for synthesizing hollow spherical LiFePO4/C

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Abstract

With the booming of new energy storage and power battery industries, sustainable recycling of retired lithium batteries has become an urgent issue in today’s society. This work develops a spray drying–assisted method for recovering used LiFePO4 to high-performance hollow spherical LiFePO4/C composites effectively. The typical technology consists of separation, purification, leaching, spray drying, and a commonly used sintering process. Structural and morphological characterization results show that the particle uniformly distributed regenerated hollow spherical powders with high crystallization and tightly coated nano-conductive carbon films. As a result of the experiment, the recovered LiFePO4/C materials possess prospective Li-ion storage properties with high discharge capacities and outstanding cyclic stability. The LiFePO4/C composite regenerated under an optimized condition shows a high capacity of 141.9 mAh g-1 at 1 C rate and retains a capacity retention of more than 99% after 100 cycles. This work proves that spray drying–assisted method is a promising strategy for recycling spent LiFePO4-based lithium-ion batteries efficiently.

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Acknowledgment

We gratefully acknowledge the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 51764029, 51804149, and 51904135), the Scientific Research Fund of Yunnan Provincial Department of Education (No. 2019 J0032), the Applied Basic Research Plan of Yunnan Province (No.2018FD039), and the Provincial Natural Science Foundation of Yunnan (No.2017FB085, 2018FB087, and 2019FB076).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. National and Local Joint Engineering Laboratory for Lithium-ion Batteries and Materials Preparation Technology, Key Laboratory of Advanced Battery Materials of Yunnan Province, Faculty of Metallurgical and Energy Engineering, Kunming University of Science and Technology, Kunming, 650093, China

    Yingjie Zhang, Hancheng Shi, Qi Meng, Yao Yao, Peng Dong, Ding Wang & Jianguo Duan

  2. RiseSun MengGuLi New Energy Science & Technology Co., Ltd., Beijing, 100000, China

    Bin Xu

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  1. Yingjie Zhang
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  2. Hancheng Shi
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  3. Qi Meng
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  7. Jianguo Duan
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Correspondence to Jianguo Duan or Bin Xu.

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We declare that we have no financial and personal relationships with other people or organizations that can inappropriately influence our work, there is no professional or other personal interest of any nature or kind in any product, service, and/or company that could be construed as influencing the position presented in, or the review of, the manuscript entitled “Spray drying–assisted recycle spent LiFePO4 for synthesizing hollow spherical LiFePO4/C”. We promise the availability of data and material and code availability.

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Zhang, Y., Shi, H., Meng, Q. et al. Spray drying–assisted recycling of spent LiFePO4 for synthesizing hollow spherical LiFePO4/C. Ionics 26, 4949–4960 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11581-020-03664-9

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