Extracting Lithium Carbonate Without Using Chemicals
Doosan Heavy Industries & Construction (DHIC) announced on May 23 that it has succeeded in developing a technology to recover lithium carbonate from waste batteries.
Lithium carbonate is a key material that generates and charges electricity in batteries. It is mainly used for laptop and cell phone batteries.
Extracting lithium carbonate from waste batteries requires such processes as heat treatment, acid leaching (melting materials with acidic solutions) and crystallization, where chemical materials such as sulfuric acid are generally used.
DHIC has developed a new lithium extraction method that does not use chemicals. It extracts lithium carbonate through electroabsorption crystallization technology after giving heat treatment to materials inside waste batteries and selectively separating lithium by using distilled water. The patented method is more economical because the process is simpler than the current extraction method, and has environmental advantages because it does not use chemicals.
Doosan Heavy Industries & Construction plans to begin the lithium extraction business in earnest. It plans to build a validation facility that can handle 1,500 tons of spent batteries annually and produce 99-percent lithium carbonate starting in the second half of 2021.