Drinking tea is a great way to recharge your batteries, and it turns out that compounds in tea work the same way for dead lithium-ion batteries as well, according to new research.
In a news release from the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, researchers from the facility's Institute of Solid State Physics explained that they used polyphenols — plant-based chemical compounds famous for their antioxidant properties — extracted from tea leaves to revive lithium-ion cathode materials.
The technique could provide an affordable, energy-saving, and planet-friendly solution to the growing e-waste crisis, which includes lithium batteries, and improve recycling methods, making electric vehicles more accessible and cost-effective.
Recycling lithium-ion batteries more efficiently will also help the environment by keeping resources in circulation and preventing heavy metals and other chemicals from leaching into groundwater and soil in landfills. Plus, mining for the minerals used in batteries is an energy-intensive process that can contaminate water sources, deplete water resources, degrade land, and release harmful carbon pollution, per Earth.org.
As the team explained, having an effective recycling strategy for battery materials is crucial, given the continued growth in demand for electric vehicles. Currently, conventional recycling methods rely on harsh chemicals or high temperatures to separate metals, but these techniques aren't economically viable for lithium-iron phosphate cathode materials, which contain fewer valuable metals.
Researchers solved this problem by using direct regeneration technology to restore the cathode material without breaking it down to the atomic level — a more energy-efficient, less wasteful approach.
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Using "naturally extracted tea polyphenols as electron donors," the team fully reversed the damage to the battery components. It also improved the longevity and performance of the regenerated cathodes by adding an aluminum source during the restoration process, helping repair missing or defective carbon layers that coat the cathode particles and are crucial for electron-ion transport.
In layman's terms, the polyphenols in the tea were able to restore the battery cathode materials to their original form, so if this process is scaled up, it could be a game changer for the EV industry.
"This scalable healing and stabilizing strategy [has] large potential to strike a balance between specific capacity repairing and stability improvement in the regeneration process," the researchers wrote in the study, published in the journal Advanced Materials.
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