Curing process for surface defects of cathode material
OwnerYadong Liu, Eric Gratz +4inventors
InventorsYadong Liu, Eric Gratz, Haixia Deng, Dhiren Mistry, Anil Parmar, Martha Monzon
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Abstract
A curing process for cathode material alleviates surface defects on particles of the cathode material for improving battery performance. Heat treating a granular form of the cathode material in a flow of an oxygen-containing gas removes surface defects on the cathode material particles that have been mechanically deagglomerated. This results in significant improvement in both the rate of charge/discharge and the number of recharge cycles.
Claims20
A method of producing a cathode material from a recycled lithium-ion battery stream, comprising
- leaching a black mass from the recycled lithium-ion battery stream to obtain a leach solution including a molar ratio of metallic elements,
- adjusting the ratio of the metallic elements in the leach solution to a selected molar ratio with additional metal salts,
- co-precipitating the metallic elements and the additional metal salts from the leach solution to form a cathode material precursor having the selected ratio,
- sintering a combination of the cathode material precursor and a lithium salt to form a sintered cathode material,
- mechanically deagglomerating the sintered cathode material to form an intermediate cathode material having surface defects, and
- heat treating the intermediate cathode material to form the cathode material.
A cathode material prepared from a recycled lithium-ion battery stream, comprising a sintered combination of a cathode material precursor and lithium salts, the cathode material precursor comprising a co-precipitated mixture of:
- metallic elements in a molar ratio obtained by leaching a black mass from the recycled lithium-ion battery stream and
- additional metal salts provided to adjust the molar ratio of the metallic elements to a selected molar ratio,
- wherein the sintered combination has been mechanically deagglomerated to form an intermediate cathode material having surface defects and heat treated to form the cathode material, the cathode material having fewer surface defects than the intermediate cathode material.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.