Volkswagen: Dynamic lithium battery recycling and extract of raw materials

　　Author ：Iflowpower – Portable Power Station Supplier

One of the successful cases of recycling can be under the hood of your car. In the United States, 99% lead-acid car battery is recyclable, which makes them one of the most recovered products you can buy. When your battery is exhausted, you can easily return it when you buy a new battery; then, the old battery can be smashed or melted, and the raw materials can be reused.

The number of batteries carried by the new generation of electric vehicles has increased significantly, and people have already recovered some concerns about these advanced lithium-ion batteries for 10 or 15 years. Volkswagen plans to produce 1 million electric vehicles in 2025 each year, and the company has been studying how to recover the driving lithium battery for its recycling, developing a second time. Why is the recycling of such a worry? Starting from the cost: Electric vehicle battery is one of the most expensive parts in such cars, because their complexity, and rare metals such as cobalt and manganese they want.

As electric vehicles become more common, these metals can be mining from waste batteries may be cheaper than from Earth mining ore. More importantly: Help to reduce the effect of transportation on carbon dioxide - not only the carbon dioxide that occurs when the vehicle is driving, but also from raw materials to the garbage dump in the entire life period to strictly control the battery recovery method. In order to cope with this challenge, the public is working on two ways: portable charger and energy saving recycling.

The portable fast charging station has been on the 10 years or more old lithium ion batteries may not be suitable for automotive supply, but it still has considerable energy capacity. (2019 Volkswagen E-Golf battery pack can store energy, even more) used in a day within one day, and even more electric vehicles may be charged in many places where there may be no chargers or even power sockets. These two issues have the same solution.

Volkswagen Group plans to produce this portable fast charging station. The fast charging station can accommodate 360 ​​kWh, the maximum can be charged at a time, the maximum fast charging output power is 100 kilowatts. As with the portable mobile phone charger, the Charging of the Volkswagen Group can always be used until it is exhausted or connected to the power supply to keep your own charge.

And its volume is small enough, which can be deployed in some difficulty to charge. The design of this charger is the same battery pack as the Volkswagen MEB Electric Vehicle Chassis, so when these battery packs are used to reach the limit, they can continue to supplement charging. The first portable rapid charger of the Volkswagen Group is expected to be installed in Germany next year.

Volkswagen Group is expected to be fully produced in 2020. After using a period of time, all batteries will lose energy capacity. This is where the Volkswagen Group Salzgite Parts is a new project to play the use.

"Battery shredder", extracting raw materials Salzgitter is expected to become the first electric vehicle battery recycling center of the Volkswagen. Next year, the center plans to initially realize the ability to recover about 1200 tons of electric car batteries annually, which is equivalent to about 3,000 cars. With a special "shredder", a single battery component can be grinded, the liquid electrolyte can be cleared, and the components are separated into "black powder".

This contains valuable cobalt, lithium, manganese and nickel raw materials, although further physical separation, and can be reused in new batteries. In the long run, the public hopes to recover about 97% of the battery pack raw materials. Today, this ratio is about 53%, Salzgite's factory is expected to further increase to 72%.

Volkswagen is expected to further disperse the recycling factory in the next few years in the next few years. Considering the number of electric vehicles in the Volkswagen Plan, for the cost and environmental considerations, the company's internal treatment of recovery will be priority - although "battery shredder" should do at least 10 years time. .