Researchers at Virginia Tech have demonstrated a green and more sustainable manufacturing method for LIBs in which no hazardous organic solvent is used during electrode manufacturing and recycling. A paper on their work is published in the journal iScience . The researchers found that the electrodes fabricated via water-based processing demonstrate comparable rate performance and cycle life to the ones from conventional solvent based processing. And utilization of a water-soluble binder enabled recovering the cathode compound from spent electrodes using water, which could be successfully regenerated to deliver comparable electrochemical performance to the original, pristine electrode. Mass production of LIBs can result in environmental concerns during battery manufacturing and disposal. Conventional LIB electrodes, especially cathodes, are manufactured through a slurry processing method where N-methyl-2- pyrrolidone (NMP) is used as a solvent. In fact, it is estimated that 4.1 million kg per year of NMP is used for depositing the […]