Recycling of Cobalt by Liquid Leaching from Waste 18650-Type Lithium-Ion Batteries

Abstract

In this work, we recover cobalt from waste 18650-type lithium-ion batteries by acid leaching. The cathode material is completely dissolved, after leaching waste batteries by using 10 mol/L industrial sulfuric acid at 70˚C for 1 h. The rate of cobalt leaching is nearly 100%. Removal of sodium carbonate, iron, aluminum and other impurities from the leaching solution was well performed by adjusting the pH to 2 - 3 with stirring vigorously. Finally, under the conditions of 55˚C - 60˚C of 240 A/m2 current density, electrodeposition current efficiency was 90.01%, the quality of the electrical output achieved cobalt 1A standard electrolytic cobalt, cobalt until greater than 90% yield. The process is easy and suitable for large-scale lithium-ion batteries used in the recovery of valuable metals.