Non-Toxic Processable Solution Up-Cycling of Spent Electrical Anode: Environmental Sustainability

Abstract

Electric vehicles (EVs) are becoming widely used worldwide to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases from transportation. Managing the enormous quantities of waste from decommissioned lithium-ion batteries, which include rare earth and vital minerals, is becoming more problematic as this rapid increase continues. They were able to transform the graphite anodes that were wasted in an electric vehicle into graphene dispersions by using higher level shearing exfoliation in aqueous surfactants. Using used graphite anodes instead of high-purity graphite flakes increases process yield by 38.6% under the same hydrodynamic circumstances. Similar to high-purity precursors, surfactant concentration decreases average atomic layer number. This study shows that some layer graphene made from graphite flake has a better electrical conductivity, and we pinpoint the drawbacks of exfoliating wasted graphite anode material using aqueous surfactant solutions. An environmentally sustainable end-to-end upcycling of spent EV anodes into new technologies is shown by the creation of working paper-based electronic circuit boards using these non-toxic solution-processable nanomaterial dispersion.