The demand for lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) is driven largely by their use in electric vehicles, which is projected to increase dramatically in the future. This great success, however, urgently calls for the efficient recycling of LIBs at the end of their life. Herein, we describe a froth flotation-based process to recycle graphite—the predominant active material for the negative electrode—from spent LIBs and investigate its reuse in newly assembled LIBs. It has been found that the structure and morphology of the recycled graphite are essentially unchanged compared to pristine commercial anode-grade graphite, and despite some minor impurities from the recycling process, the recycled graphite provides a remarkable reversible specific capacity of more than 350 mAh g⁻¹. Even more importantly, newly assembled graphite‖NMC₅₃₂ cells show excellent cycling stability with a capacity retention of 80% after 1000 cycles, that is, comparable to the performance of reference full cells comprising pristine commercial graphite.

中文翻译：

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再生石墨用于更可持续的锂离子电池

锂离子电池 (LIB) 的需求主要是由其在电动汽车中的使用推动的，预计未来电动汽车的使用将大幅增加。然而，这一巨大成功迫切需要在锂离子电池寿命结束时对其进行有效回收。在此，我们描述了一种基于泡沫浮选的工艺，从废锂离子电池中回收石墨（负极的主要活性材料），并研究其在新组装的锂离子电池中的再利用。研究发现，与原始商业阳极级石墨相比，回收石墨的结构和形态基本没有变化，尽管回收过程中存在一些少量杂质，但回收石墨提供了超过 350 mAh g 的显着可逆比容量⁻¹。更重要的是，新组装的石墨‖NMC ₅₃₂电池表现出优异的循环稳定性，1000次循环后容量保持率为80%，也就是说，与包含原始商用石墨的参考全电池的性能相当。