About this Research Topic
One of the main challenges that humanity has to face up for reducing the emissions from fossil fuels is, without any doubt, the energy production together with its storage and handling. In the last decades attention of the research (and of the market) has been progressively focused on green and more sustainable alternative ways for both the production of energy (e.g., photovoltaic, wind power) and its storing in stationary and mobile applications (e.g., batteries, super capacitors). In this context, one of most successful outcomes of the modern scientific research are lithium ion batteries (LIBs), efficient electrochemical devices able to store energy, and make it available on request, by exploiting the movement of lithium ions between two oppositely charged electrodes.
LIB technology is of paramount importance to reach a “fossil fuel-free society”, as officially recognized by the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and as confirmed by the ubiquity of LIBs in the modern life (from the portable small electronic devices, to the electric vehicles). Nonetheless, a thorny issue is actually still to be solved to be able to really label LIBs as a sustainable and green technology. The challenge concerns with the treatment of spent batteries. How can we smartly reuse or recycle the batteries, which have reached the end of their life, and subsequently recover their many constituting materials? How can we do it in an economical and environmental sustainable way? Is it necessary to properly re-engineer the design and the assembly of the cells?
The basic and the applied research must synergistically combine efforts to provide valid pathways to solve this urgent issue, considering the huge amount of operative e-vehicles that in few years will produce several amounts of spent LIBs. Moreover, the expected increment of the production rate of e-vehicles can be hardly satisfied by primary sources. All of these aspects make processing of spent LIBs even more serious.
The scope of the this Research Topic is to collect novel and promising results and ideas devoted to tackle the thorny issue of spent LIBs. The Topic strongly encourages contributions dealing with every step of the processing of spent LIBs, from the assessment of the state of health (SoH) and state of charge (SoC) to the leaching and the recovery of metals, including approaches for the second life of LIBs. Studies involving real matrices (instead of synthetic, home-made samples) and scalable strategies are strongly encouraged, to draw valid routes that can help the many industrial actors that are investing capitals in this field. We welcome Original Research, Review, Mini Review and Perspective articles on themes including, but not limited to:
• Hydrometallurgical recovery process
• Pyrometallurgical recovery processes
• Combined leaching processes (e.g., mechanochemical, sonochemical)
• Electrochemical and chemical processes for the selective recovery of metallic and non-metallic materials
• Novelty in the assessment of SoC and SoH
• Approaches for second life LIBs
• Components of the cell made of easy-to-recover materials
• Recovery-oriented design of the novel cells
• Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Cost (LCC) studies
LIB technology is of paramount importance to reach a “fossil fuel-free society”, as officially recognized by the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and as confirmed by the ubiquity of LIBs in the modern life (from the portable small electronic devices, to the electric vehicles). Nonetheless, a thorny issue is actually still to be solved to be able to really label LIBs as a sustainable and green technology. The challenge concerns with the treatment of spent batteries. How can we smartly reuse or recycle the batteries, which have reached the end of their life, and subsequently recover their many constituting materials? How can we do it in an economical and environmental sustainable way? Is it necessary to properly re-engineer the design and the assembly of the cells?
The basic and the applied research must synergistically combine efforts to provide valid pathways to solve this urgent issue, considering the huge amount of operative e-vehicles that in few years will produce several amounts of spent LIBs. Moreover, the expected increment of the production rate of e-vehicles can be hardly satisfied by primary sources. All of these aspects make processing of spent LIBs even more serious.
The scope of the this Research Topic is to collect novel and promising results and ideas devoted to tackle the thorny issue of spent LIBs. The Topic strongly encourages contributions dealing with every step of the processing of spent LIBs, from the assessment of the state of health (SoH) and state of charge (SoC) to the leaching and the recovery of metals, including approaches for the second life of LIBs. Studies involving real matrices (instead of synthetic, home-made samples) and scalable strategies are strongly encouraged, to draw valid routes that can help the many industrial actors that are investing capitals in this field. We welcome Original Research, Review, Mini Review and Perspective articles on themes including, but not limited to:
• Hydrometallurgical recovery process
• Pyrometallurgical recovery processes
• Combined leaching processes (e.g., mechanochemical, sonochemical)
• Electrochemical and chemical processes for the selective recovery of metallic and non-metallic materials
• Novelty in the assessment of SoC and SoH
• Approaches for second life LIBs
• Components of the cell made of easy-to-recover materials
• Recovery-oriented design of the novel cells
• Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Cost (LCC) studies
Keywords: Lithium ion batteries, Black mass, Circular processes, Recovery of metals and non-metals, Second life batteries, Hydrometallurgy, Pyrometallurgy, Recovery-oriented cell design, Easy-to-recover electrodes
Important Note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.
