Princeton Startup Aims to Fast-track Lithium Battery Recycling.Billions of dead lithium-ion batteries, including many from electric vehicles, are accumulating because there is no cost-effective process to revive them. Now, Princeton researchers have developed an inexpensive, sustainable way to make new batteries from used ones and have spun off a company to scale up the innovation.
Princeton NuEnergy uses a process developed by researchers who combined expertise from diverse fields to solve a longstanding problem: how to turn spent cathode materials, or the expensive part of a lithium-ion battery, which contain elements such as cobalt, nickel, manganese and lithium, into pristine new cathodes. Current technologies for recycling lithium-ion batteries rely on harsh chemicals and high-temperature, energy-intensive processes to break down spent batteries to their elemental components. These processes have been challenging to scale up commercially and in an environmentally viable way. Instead, Princeton NuEnergy is upgrading and renewing the cathodes themselves in a form of direct recycling.
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