With the continuous improvement of battery technology, the country's research on new energy has gradually deepened, and the popularity of new energy cars has greatly increased. However, with the growth of time, the lithium batteries of new energy cars will have a certain degree of loss. If they are directly thrown away, it will cause significant pollution to the environment. Under the demand for environmental protection, the recycling process of lithium batteries becomes particularly important.

Keywords: lithium battery, recycling

With the continuous improvement of people's understanding of environmental protection, the demand for new energy cars continues to rise, promoting the continuous development of new energy cars. This marks that China has begun to move from a car country to a car power, but the problem that comes with it is the handling of batteries; The service life of cadmium nickel batteries is generally 2 to 3 years, lead-acid batteries are generally 3 to 5 years, and lithium batteries are generally 5 to 8 years. How to dispose of batteries after use is very important. People's requirements for ecological environment quality have given rise to battery recycling processes and continuously promoted their development.

1. Development of new energy vehicles

1.1 Development process of batteries

In the 1880s, Italian physicist and doctor Giovanni used a sword to touch the exposed nerves on the peeled legs of a frog while conducting experiments on dissecting frogs. The frog legs convulsed violently and small electrical sparks appeared at the same time. Through repeated experiments, he confirmed that he believed spasms were caused by the electricity already present in the animal's body, which he called "animal electricity". In the 1790s, Italian physicist Alessandro Giuseppe Antonio Volta immersed zinc and silver plates in a certain concentration of saltwater and discovered that there was an electric current passing through the wire between the two metals. So he placed a cloth soaked in saltwater between multiple pieces of zinc and silver, stacked them flat, and felt a strong electric current when touching both ends with his hand. Volta successfully created the world's first battery using this phenomenon - the "Ford cell stack", also known as the "Ford cell stack". In 1860, the Frenchman Prandtl developed a rechargeable battery using lead as an electrode, hence the name lead-acid battery. With its advantages of low price and stable function, lead-acid batteries are still the first choice for electric vehicles until modern times; Around 1990, lithium batteries with metal lithium as electrodes gradually appeared in shopping malls. Compared to lead-acid batteries, these batteries can store larger amounts of electricity. Lithium batteries were first used in the field of mobile phones, and with the continuous maturity of skills, they gradually became the preferred power source for new energy cars. The development schedule of the battery is shown in Figure 1.

At that time, the batteries used in new energy cars were generally divided into two categories: lithium iron phosphate batteries and ternary lithium batteries. Lithium iron phosphate battery is a lithium-ion battery that uses lithium iron phosphate as the positive electrode material and carbon as the negative electrode material. It has a series of advantages such as high working voltage, long cycle life, low cost, good safety function, low self discharge rate, and no memory effect. At present, lithium iron phosphate batteries have irreplaceable advantages in the fields of passenger cars, logistics vehicles, low-speed electric vehicles, etc. A ternary lithium battery refers to a lithium battery that uses nickel cobalt manganese oxide as the positive electrode material and graphite as the negative electrode material. Compared to lithium iron phosphate batteries, ternary lithium batteries have significant advantages in energy density, power, and other aspects, making them the preferred choice for pure electric car batteries at that time.