Recovery of Lithium from electrical energy storage Units

As part of the growing electric mobility the topic of “mobile power supply” is of central importance. The current state-of-the-art technology for compact and mobile power supply units in electric vehicles is the Lithium-Ion battery.  In addition to this battery technology there are numerous other concepts based on nickel-cadmium or metal hydride technologies.  The Lithium battery is considered the most promising version for the future. For this reason the demand for Lithium will continue to rise, in conjunction with the increasing number of electric vehicles, and other devices, coming on the market.  The Lithium-Ion technology, however, is considered expensive. According to the current level of development of electric mobility the battery is the most expensive part of the electric car. This is also linked to the raw material supply of the market. An essential approach to the lowering of battery prices is, from MME’s point of view, that technologies be made available which can recover the raw material Lithium as a pure substance from dead Lithium-Ion batteries, in order to feed it into a closed circuit of the manufacturing industry. Because Lithium-Ion batteries are made of a number of different materials the challenge is to design suitable technological concepts for separating the individual metal fractions. MME is rising to the challenge of establishing suitable recycling concepts.