2022/04/18 by Ulrike Boesenberg, Christian Henriksen, Kaare Lund Rasmussen +3 · 1 citation
Engineering · #Advancements in Battery Materials #Advanced Battery Technologies Research #Extraction and Separation Processes
paper · doi:10.1021/acsaem.1c03966
openalex publication_date 2022/04/18 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
Recycling of Li-ion batteries is going to be a major challenge in the coming years in order to preserve the precious resources in battery materials. Within this challenge lies the task of identifying the state of the materials in the used batteries in order to determine the recyclability of the material. In this paper, we investigate the state of a set of LiFePO 4 electrodes from A123 18650 graphite-LiFePO 4 cells, which have been cycled continuously for 6.5 years (6533 cycles at a current rate of C/5). The spatially resolved morphological, chemical, and structural states of cycled as well as uncycled electrodes are mapped by sub-micrometer resolution synchrotron X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy and X-ray diffraction collected simultaneously over the same selected statistical relevant electrode areas (>100 000 μm 2 ). The study reveals a very high morphological and chemical stability of the LiFePO 4 electrodes and underlines the structural robustness of the olivine LiFePO 4 structure. These findings highlight the potential for low-process recycling of LiFePO 4 electrode materials.