RELIB: Reuse and Recycling of Lithium-ion Batteries

Title: RELIB: Reuse and Recycling of Lithium-ion Batteries

Duration: 2.45 mins

Begins

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[RELIB: Reuse and Recycling of Lithium-ion Batteries]

[Dr Simon Lambert, Senior Lecturer, Newcastle University]  The RELIB project stands for recycling of Lithium-ion batteries.  It's a government funded project through the Faraday institution led by  the University of Birmingham and the other partners are Edinburgh University, Newcastle University, Leicester and University College London. 

So Lithium-ion batteries are all around us in everyday life,  there's already an awful lot of people driving electric vehicles so the battery in their car depending on whether it's a hybrid it might be the size of a small suitcase or if it's a fully electric SUV the battery could weigh the same as a small car so they do range in scale. That's really where a lot of the challenges are in what we're doing in the recycling work. 

Larger batteries may contain thousands of cells so you're also getting a scale clearly in volume and mass but in voltage so the challenges are really diverse and they're really multi-disciplinary

[Dr Ben de Laune, Research Project Manager, Faraday Institution] I think one of the real beauties of the project is actually doing a lot more of the upfront work. So rather than just taking a battery pack and sticking it through a shredder and mincing it all up,  it's actually doing all this disassembly and deconstructing the battery pack into smaller smaller units that can be more easily recycled.

[Dr Alireza Rastegarpanah, Research Scientist in Robotics and AI, University of Birmingham] AI is quite an important element during the process of disassembly because we have diversity in design of batteries. So at the moment there is no standard and AI helps us to generalize the process. We are creating digital passports and making data sets to understand the details of design for various batteries.

[Dr Simon Lambert]  The project is five years old and at the beginning it's a collaboration of academic partners now moving through that there have been several inventions and discoveries which have gained a lot of traction and interest with industrial partners.

What we need to do is remember why we're making batteries in the first place,  why are we going towards electrification of everything and ultimately it's because of our environment. You need something that's going to unify and galvanize so many different areas such as research, industry, government, policy, you know these things don't come together on their own.

This is why the RELIB project is so brilliant, I think because it touches on all of these areas and this is where I think the FI have a really key role in doing this, trying to help support and pull these things together so that the brilliant academic research is translated into industry and government policy. But you only get that opportunity really to do this at the start of something new and we're at the start of something new right now, and which is one of the beauties of the project. 

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