More than a hundred years have passed since the world's first family car for ordinary people came out. Although fuel vehicles are still the standard of mainstream models today, with the increasing severity of various environmental and energy crises, the automotive industry is currently undergoing a transformation from fuel-driven to electric-driven.
In this transformation, the world is exploring lithium-ion batteries, and the electrification of cars seems to have been irreversible, but the use of a large number of batteries also means one thing - a large number of waste batteries need to be disposed of.
It is conceivable that if these new energy vehicle batteries are not scientifically recycled and treated, but just blindly enter the landfill, it will pollute the land and groundwater, and the environmental problems caused by them will be more serious than that of fuel vehicles.
From "closing the rags" to the new blue ocean of the 100-billion-level market
Because of this, in the past two years, because of the heat of the new energy market, battery recycling, which people can't see on the table, has entered the commercial pattern for the first time and become a new blue ocean.
According to data from the China Automotive Technology and Research Center, the cumulative number of decommissioned power batteries in China will exceed 200,000 tons in 2020, and the market size will reach 10 billion yuan; by 2025, the scale of the mainland waste power battery recycling market will exceed 40 billion yuan; by 2030, the recycling of ternary lithium and lithium iron phosphate batteries will become a 100 billion market.
To recycle, you first have to evaluate the chemicals in the battery, and then you have to carry out a sustainable recycling program, and then there must be X-rays, because only the X-ray diffractometer can tell you what kind of garbage it is.
In the field of lithium batteries, XRD is also an old tool man
X-ray diffraction (XRD) technology has long been widely used in lithium-ion battery research, production and failure analysis. From raw minerals to electrode materials, XRD is a routine means of qualitative and quantitative analysis of the phases in materials. For the negative electrode material graphite, the degree of graphitization, an important parameter affecting battery performance, needs to be characterized by XRD; at the same time, XRD can also determine the pole compaction process by analyzing the degree of negative electrode orientation in the production of lithium-ion batteries.
In situ charge-discharge diffraction experiments can directly study the structural changes and phase conversion of positive and negative electrode materials of lithium-ion battery materials with button structure during charge and discharge. In addition, the hard-ray XRD is used to perform in-situ charge and discharge experiments on soft pack batteries, and the failure analysis of the whole battery can also be performed.
XRD Helps with Waste?
As we all know, lithium batteries contain a large number of valuable metals lithium, nickel, cobalt, etc., these metals in the waste lithium battery content is still not low, so in recent years, many scientific research institutes in the mainland have begun the research work of waste battery recycling, and developed a variety of technologies to improve the recycling of valuable metals in waste batteries, reduce the management risk of solid waste, and improve environmental efficiency.
For example, the Quality Development Institute of Kunming University of Science and Technology once conducted experimental analysis on the pollution characteristics of waste lithium cobalt batteries and lithium iron batteries under different heat treatment conditions, including different temperatures, time, gases and feeding volumes; The experimental process is through the collection of samples, discharge treatment, disassembly and finally analysis of components by X-ray diffractometer, up to heat treatment and sampling analysis.
Experimental results show that the optimal temperature for heat treatment of waste lithium batteries is 600 °C, at this time the metal recovery rate is the highest and the pollution emission is the lowest, the metal recovery rate of lithium cobalt batteries is 95.38%, cobalt 93.99%, copper 96.24%, aluminum 85.28%, lithium iron battery metal recovery rates are lithium 90.01%, iron 85.49%, copper 83.72%, aluminum 73.75%, although different intake composition will affect the metal recovery rate, but the gap is not large. It can be seen that the recovery of valuable metals in waste batteries has great market potential.
In addition, the Environmental Functional Materials Research Group of the Institute of Urban Environment of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has also announced a way to "treat waste with waste". It is to disassemble the waste lithium iron phosphate battery after full discharge, and the positive electrode sheet containing lithium iron phosphate material can be obtained, and then analyzed by XRD, and finally the method of preparing hydroxyferrophosphate is used to recover and process the waste lithium iron phosphate battery. This study provides a new idea for the recycling of lithium iron phosphate battery waste with a high proportion of lithium-ion batteries in the mainland.
It can also be seen from the above two studies that it is imperative to explore a reasonable method for recycling waste lithium-ion batteries and realize the rational utilization of precious metal resources in waste lithium-ion batteries. In this process, we need XRD to conduct a fast, accurate, non-destructive assessment, and develop a final reasonable solution, it can be said that XRD provides a very important and feasible data and analysis means for the safety research and internal material analysis of waste lithium-ion batteries.
epilogue:
In the context of the double carbon target, the battery industry has entered a large demand, large production capacity, a big era, and the economy of waste batteries, large-scale recycling and treatment is also imminent, in recent years, the mainland has frequently introduced relevant policies to help power battery recycling, the entire industry has entered the eve of rapid development, including X-ray diffraction, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, mass spectrometer and other analytical instruments, on the one hand to promote the level of technical equipment of related enterprises, on the other hand, it is also in a high-safety and low-cost way, Support the healthy development of the new energy industry.