Smelting

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, 9433 kg.
4. Lithium: it stays in the slag and is lost to the loop on this setting.

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.

Flue dust

The fine solids caught from a furnace's off-gas. When a chloride flux is added to a battery smelter, lithium evaporates as lithium chloride and is recovered from the flue dust instead of being lost to the slag.

Hydrometallurgy

Recycling by dissolving black mass in acid and separating the metals as salts by precipitation and solvent extraction. It recovers lithium and gives battery-grade products, at the cost of chemical consumption and wastewater.

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.

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.