Flue dust

Example

See it in the plant

1. Charge: 30.38 t of cells go in with coke as reductant and silica and lime as flux.
2. Melt: at 1200–1450 °C carbon and plastics burn and supply heat; the oxides of nickel, cobalt, copper and iron are reduced to metal.
3. Separate: the heavy alloy collects at the bottom, 8120 kg, and is tapped, granulated and sent to the leach. Aluminium and manganese stay oxides in the slag, 8769 kg.
4. Volatilise: a chloride flux turns lithium into lithium chloride, which leaves with the gas and is caught as flue dust: 564 kg goes to the lithium step.

Use in Lemonergy

Distinguish recovered material from a qualified product.

This is a reference concept. No executable Lemonergy block has been verified for this term.

Connected concepts

Related concepts from the knowledge graph. Connections show context, not cause and effect. Hover or focus a linked term for its definition.

Lithium recovery

Getting the lithium back, which smelting loses to slag and older hydrometallurgical flowsheets left until last at low yield. Newer routes take it out first — by roasting or carbonating black mass and washing out a lithium salt — before the other metals are leached.

Pyrometallurgy

Recycling by smelting whole cells or modules in a furnace, which recovers nickel, cobalt and copper as an alloy but loses lithium, aluminium and graphite to the slag. It is robust to mixed feed and is often the first step before a hydrometallurgical finish.

Slag

The molten layer of oxides that floats on the metal in a smelter, collecting aluminium, manganese, silicon and calcium, and lithium unless the process is designed to recover it. It is tapped separately and used in construction or, where it holds enough lithium, leached.

Smelting

Melting battery material in a furnace with fluxes so that cobalt, nickel and copper collect as a metal alloy or matte and the rest — lithium, aluminium, manganese — goes to the slag. The organic parts and graphite serve as fuel and reductant.

References & further reading

Further reading on this topic

These sources provide broader context; they are not presented as citations for every statement in this entry.

1. Lithium-Ion Battery Recycling

   U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

   Topic background · Battery construction, recycling routes and U.S. waste-management context.

2. Recycling lithium-ion batteries from electric vehicles

   Gavin Harper et al. · Nature · 2019

   Topic background · Reuse, disassembly and mechanical, hydro-, pyro- and direct recycling routes.