At the same time, however, some issues have become increasingly apparent: such as the resource bottlenecks of nickel, cobalt, and rare earths, and the environmental pollution of scrapped batteries. According to statistics, in 2010, China’s battery industry consumed about 23,000 tons of metal nickel, about 4,000 tons of metal cobalt, and about 8,000 tons of mixed rare earth metals. The average life expectancy of power batteries is about 3 to 8 years, and the shortage of power batteries caused by a large number of failed power batteries. The environmental problems are getting worse. 　　 Significant environmental benefits As the market price of nickel, cobalt, and rare earth, which are the main valuable metals for power batteries, is rising, it will seriously affect the manufacturing cost of power batteries. NiMH batteries, for example, used nickel-hydrogen batteries with a nickel content of 30% to 50%, a cobalt content of 2% to 5%, and a rare earth content of 5% to 10%, which have a high economic value for recycling. The model specifications of the power battery products are uniform, the composition content is stable, and the application market is easy to manage. These provide very convenient conditions for recycling. It can be predicted that in the future, the recycling of power batteries will become a new industry, and the recovery and regeneration of failed power batteries will not only bring huge environmental benefits, but will also bring considerable economic and social benefits. This not only can effectively control the cost of the battery, but also positively affects the popularity of hybrid vehicles. The rare earth resources used in nickel-metal hydride batteries are mainly rare earth metals such as yttrium, ytterbium, ytterbium, and neodymium, and exist in the form of nickel, cobalt, manganese, and other metals that melt to form negative electrode active materials for hydrogen storage alloys. It can be seen that the chemical composition of the nickel-metal hydride battery is very complex, compared with other batteries such as nickel-cadmium batteries, its recovery and separation is much more difficult. Honda and Nihon Heavy Industries Co., Ltd. jointly developed a nickel-metal hydride battery recycling production process, which extracts mixed rare earth oxides from spent products, and further fused salt electrolysis to produce mixed rare earth metals that can be used directly to prepare anode materials for nickel-metal hydride batteries. This method has more cost and component advantages than rare earths extracted from mines. In addition, the direct application of mixed rare earths obtained by molten salt electrolysis also avoids complex rare earth separation purification and shortens the traditional recovery process. This recycling mode will become the main recycling model for the disposal of electronic appliances in the future. 　　 Domestic "blank area" At present, the domestic nickel-metal hydride power battery market has not yet formed a climate, production and sales volume is not large, the number of failed batteries is not much, for the recovery of nickel-hydrogen battery is also in the technological research stage. The recovery of ordinary civilian batteries is due to the weak environmental awareness and the unsound recovery system. As a result, the overall domestic recycling rate is less than 2%. The vast majority of ordinary civilian waste batteries are discarded by consumers and household waste, and are not recycled. In addition, the variety of ordinary civilian batteries, including primary alkaline manganese batteries, nickel-metal hydride batteries, nickel-cadmium batteries, lithium-ion batteries, etc., increased the difficulty of sorting after recycling. The specifications and compositional content of the same type of battery also vary greatly, which further increases the difficulty of recovery. In addition, if you want to re-use the battery, because battery materials have very high requirements for impurity content control, batch stability, and consistency, it is difficult to form a large-scale recycling industrial chain. Some domestic companies that recycle waste batteries use nickel metal hydride batteries to produce nickel sulphate or cobalt chloride through hydrometallurgy, or to process ultra-fine nickel powder or cobalt powder with higher added value. Cobalt ball nickel, ternary material precursors and other products, while the rare earth can be a higher purity of rare earth double salt, but due to the need to further refine the mixed rare earth salt, resulting in lower sales prices, most of them are in a state of hoarding. The rare earth recycling companies, which are concentrated in Jiangxi, Jiangsu, and Shandong, are mainly engaged in the recycling of rare earth magnetic materials. After the rare earth oxides are separated, they are further smelted into metal. At present, there is no real battery rare earth recycling company. Nankai University has developed a negative electrode rare earth hydrogen storage alloy powder regeneration technology, the collected hydrogen storage alloy scrap after certain pretreatment to remove harmful impurities in the waste, while adding a certain amount of valuable metals, and then vacuum melting directly to obtain nickel hydrogen Qualified hydrogen storage alloy for battery manufacturing. This production process is simple, safe, reliable, non-polluting, and the recycling rate of alloying elements is high and the cost is low. However, such hydrogen storage alloy scraps have high requirements for raw material recovery, unstable product quality, high product impurity content, and still have certain differences in product performance and original alloy performance. Therefore, this recycling method is subject to certain restrictions. In recent years, the National Engineering Research Center for Advanced Energy Storage Materials has also conducted a series of researches on the recovery and reuse of rare earths in nickel metal hydride batteries. The research idea is to prepare the spent nickel-hydrogen battery to become a negative electrode hydrogen storage alloy material. Applied to the production of nickel-hydrogen battery, has applied for two invention patents. The scale application of this recycling technology can reduce the production cost of NiMH batteries and will play a positive role in the development of the domestic hybrid automobile industry. Free Standing Electric Patio Heater Free Standing Electric Patio Heater,Free Standing Patio Heater,Electric Patio Heater,Outdoor Electric Patio Heater MasonShek Foshan Electrical Appliances Co., Ltd. , http://www.warmwatcher.com
With the depletion of global oil reserves and the continuous deterioration of the environment, new energy vehicles will become the future direction of automotive development. Lithium-ion, nickel-metal hydride and other power batteries have emerged as the best source of green energy for new energy electric vehicles because of their outstanding performance in terms of high specific energy, long life, high current discharge, and no pollution.
Recently, Honda Corporation has taken the lead in establishing the recycling mechanism of nickel-metal hydride batteries for hybrid vehicles in the world, and put the rare earths extracted from nickel-metal hydride batteries of hybrid vehicles as practical materials for nickel-metal hydride batteries. Honda’s recycling of rare earth resources has attracted widespread attention in the industry and has led to discussions on the recycling and reuse of power batteries.