Currently, the number of retired power batteries on the market is increasing, but the power battery recycling market is still developing slowly. The main reasons for this are as follows:
Due to technological limitations, recycling power batteries is not something anyone can do. Currently, the industry generally recognizes two approaches to the recycling and utilization of power batteries: tiered utilization and dismantling and recycling. From a technical perspective, both approaches have certain technological barriers.
Second-hand utilization refers to the re-testing and screening of recycled power batteries, pairing them into groups for use in fields with lower battery performance requirements, such as energy storage and low-speed electric vehicles. According to industry standards, power batteries reach their retirement age when their capacity decays to around 80%. Although they are no longer suitable for automobiles, they can still be utilized in other areas, offering significant potential for reuse. However, when reusing these batteries, it is necessary to test their electrochemical performance and lifespan degradation, selecting batteries with similar data for grouping to ensure battery consistency and the safety of the entire battery system. For a long time, however, there has been no unified standard for power batteries in new energy vehicles. This has led to a wide variety of power batteries, from the initial lead-acid batteries to later nickel-cadmium and nickel-metal hydride batteries, and now ternary lithium batteries. Unifying these batteries with inconsistent standards and diverse technical structures is no simple task.
Power batteries with a capacity below 40% must be dismantled and recycled. In theory, valuable metal elements such as nickel, cobalt, manganese, and lithium salts can be extracted from retired power batteries and recycled into the manufacture of new batteries.
Similar to secondary use, dismantling and recycling also involves dealing with batteries of different brands and types. The dismantling solutions must be tailored to the different internal structural designs of the batteries, their series and parallel connection configurations, service and usage time, vehicle models used, and common operating conditions. This is no small feat.
