Holistic battery recycling requires processes rooted in various disciplines like electrical engineering, particle technology, chemistry, and metallurgy. Depending on the goal of the recycling process or the prioritized products, the usage of individual processing steps and their sequence leads to various process chains. Furthermore, the reverse transformation from the battery back to suitable intermediates or elements depends on the recycling process input and process chain input. Namely, these are the properties and material composition of the battery and the intermediate products. In this setting, improvement and optimization depend on multiple considerable criteria. This work aims to enhance the entire recycling process chain through coordinated and structured data management, thereby identifying and unlocking efficiency potentials.
Data-based methods can help to understand the underlying dependencies within and between the process steps in battery recycling. Therefore, data management must handle vast amounts of data within a single process chain and across multiple process chains. The first step includes strategies and technologies for industrial data acquisition, transformation, and storage oriented toward a defined research question. Critical processes and process chains can be modeled with the transformed data in the next step.
This work presents an approach towards effective data management in a battery recycling process chain. An NMC battery module is fed to a mechanical treatment to recover the battery active material as the so-called black mass. After pyrolysis of the black mass, the material mixture is put through a hydrometallurgical treatment. We cover the differences between the individual processes and their effects on the data acquisition and handling strategy. Finally, the data from an entire recycling process chain is aggregated. The poster visualizes the aggregated date in the form of a material flow analysis extended by a discussion on the elemental composition of different types of black mass. Further extending the material flow, outlines on the processes and their technology are shown. A particular focus is on multi-site processing on the same feedstock for more processing options, including networking among the partners and exchanging data records that enable comprehensive visualization of the recycling route.