Project 4-5

Tremendous progress has been made in developing nanomaterials-based rechargeable batteries (lithium-ion, lithium-sulfur, lithium-metal, etc.) in recent decades. Development of different kinds of nanomaterials have substantially improved the battery performances. To date, however, very little attention has been given to recycling the nanomaterials in the end-of-life next-generation batteries. We aim to tackle this significant challenge and therefore to develop a proactive thinking in this new field.

Specific objectives:

• Development of high-performance lithium-ion batteries based on recycled silicon nanomaterials
• Investigation of performance decay in batteries based on recycled nanomaterials
• Development of technologies that can efficiently extract lithium ions and remove solid electrolyte interphase in recycled battery electrodes
• Establishment of workflows for recycling nanomaterials from emerging batteries, such as lithium-sulfur batteries.

Expected outcome:

• obtain a deep understanding of how the performances of nanomaterials decay in batteries
• show the important possibility of recycling used nanomaterials from end-of-life batteries
• establish a general protocol which can be applied to other nanomaterial systems