Structure Recovery and Recycling of Used LiCoO₂ Cathode Material

A large number of lithium batteries have been retiring from the market of energy storage. Thus, recycling of the used electrode materials is becoming urgent. In this study, an industrial machinery processing was used to recover the crystal structure of the waste LiCoO₂ materials with the combination of small-scale equipment repair technology. The results show that the crystal parameters of the repaired LiCoO₂ material become small, the unit cell volume is reduced, and the crystal structure tends to be stable. The Co-O bond length of 1.9134 nm, O-Co-O bond angle of 94.72°, the (003) interplanar spacing of 0.467 nm indicate the excellent recovery level of the repaired LiCoO₂ . In addition, the electrochemical performance of the repaired LiCoO₂ material is greatly improved, compared with the waste material. The capacity of the repaired electrode material can be maintained at 120 mAh g^-1 after 100 cycles at the current density of 0.2C. The promising rate performance of the repaired electrode material demonstrates the stable structure. This research work provides a large-scale method for the direct recovery of LiCoO₂ with the reduction of unnecessary energy and reagent consumption, which will be beneficial to the environmental protection.