Mining & metallurgy
Lithium Batteries Production
GEA provides multiple technologies for major upstream and midstream lithium processing steps. Our portfolio starts at the mine and extends beyond the dried battery powder, supporting the recycling of batteries by extracting and purifying critical metals such as cobalt, lithium, and nickel.
Lithium batteries: Production and recycling
Lithium is a crucial element in today's technology landscape. Its lightness and high electrochemical potential make it ideal for battery production. Lithium batteries power portable electronic devices, electric vehicles, and renewable energy storage systems, making them indispensable in our daily lives.
Making raw materials accessible.
GEA successfully bridges engineering challenges and helps customers to process mineral, renewable and secondary raw materials. In the case of Lithium GEA provides solutions for:
- Lithium brine concentration
- Lithium salt crystallization
- Lithium salt purification by re-crystallization
- By-product recovery from lithium processing
- Impurity removal (precipitation)
- Solid/liquid centrifugal separation equipment
- Fluid bed drying of lithium hydroxide and lithium carbonate
GEA's comprehensive lithium processing solutions
At GEA, we offer advanced technologies for efficient and high-quality lithium processing. Our solutions cover the entire production process, ensuring the best results at every step:
- Evaporative Concentration
Our evaporative concentration technology efficiently concentrates lithium brine, reducing volume and increasing lithium content.
- Precipitation
GEA's systems ensure precise control over chemical reactions, removing impurities and producing high-purity lithium compounds.
- Crystallization
We use controlled cooling and evaporation to form pure lithium crystals, producing high-purity lithium salts like lithium carbonate and lithium hydroxide.
- Purification
Our advanced purification techniques, including re-crystallization, achieve the highest purity levels by removing remaining impurities.
- Separation
GEA's state-of-the-art solid/liquid separation equipment ensures efficient recovery of lithium and minimizes waste.
- Drying
Our fluid bed drying technology dries lithium hydroxide and lithium carbonate powders, meeting the required specifications for battery production.
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Lithium processing? GEA has you covered.
GEA's extensive lithium solutions for battery production
The purified lithium is converted into electrolytes, which act as a conductive medium in batteries. Lithium is combined with other materials to form anodes and cathodes, essential for battery production. GEA's spray drying technology produces high-quality lithium cathode and anode materials, enabling the production of resource-efficient batteries.
- Spray drying of cathode and anode materials
GEA's spray drying technology is used to produce high-quality lithium cathode and anode materials. This process involves atomizing a liquid feed into a hot drying chamber, where the solvent evaporates, leaving behind fine, dry particles. These particles are essential for the production of lithium-ion batteries
- Solvent recovery and refining
During the battery production process, GEA also offers solutions for solvent recovery. This ensures that valuable solvents are not wasted and can be reused in the production process, enhancing efficiency and resource efficiency.
Finally, the electrodes and electrolytes are assembled into battery cells. And assembled in large blocks integrated in various devices such as electronic vehicles.
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Spray drying battery grade powder
Recycling of Battery Material
Recycling lithium batteries is crucial to reduce environmental impact and reuse valuable resources. The recycling process involves several steps to recover and reuse the materials:
- Collection and Sorting: Used batteries are collected and sorted by type and condition to ensure proper recycling.
- Component Separation and Material Preparation: The batteries are disassembled, and the various components such as lithium, cobalt, nickel, and other metals are separated using the following unit operation steps:
- Evaporative Concentration for concentrating lithium brine.
- Precipitation: for impurity removal.
- Crystallization: for production of high-purity lithium salts.
- Separation: Solid/liquid separation equipment.
- Drying: of lithium hydroxide and lithium carbonate as intermediates for battery production.
- Reuse and Manufacturing: The recycled materials are reused in new batteries or other products, reducing the need for new raw materials
Efficient recycling of lithium batteries helps close the loop of material usage and promotes circularity in battery production.
By combining advanced manufacturing processes and effective recycling methods, lithium becomes a key resource for the future of energy.
Process Development Expertise
With a rich history in supplying systems for the purification, recovery, and drying of organic& inorganic chemicals, we leverage our advanced separation, evaporation, crystallization, and drying technologies. Our cutting-edge R&D capabilities are designed to optimize process design, ensuring efficient product quality and minimizing performance risks. We design and supply commercial equipment, taking full responsibility for the processes we develop. We offer complete process guarantees, seamlessly scaling up from lab to commercial systems.
In lithium-ion battery production, high-purity precursor materials are essential. Our technological expertise and specialized testing enable us to identify the right processes to achieve the desired purity levels, even from unique sources with varying contaminant levels. This is particularly important for sensitive compounds like nickel and cobalt.
Trade press releases
Some lithium news by GEA.
GEA technology for the production of pure lithium hydroxide, a key raw material for lithium-ion batteries
Lithium hydroxide is one of the key raw materials for the battery industry world-wide. Producers of lithium-ion batteries require the raw material in the highest quality as "battery grade" for the production of cathode materials. GEA's technology portfolio covers the essential process steps of lithium extraction.
GEA equips two additional lithium hydroxide production lines from Albemarle with centrifuge packages
GEA is equipping two additional production lines of the energy storage and specialty chemicals group Albemarle for the production of lithium hydroxide.
GEA evaporation and crystallization technology for POSCO Argentina
GEA evaporation and crystallization technology is at the heart of POSCO Group's new lithium hydroxide (LHM) plant in Güemes, Argentina. The lithium hydroxide production plant was officially inaugurated at the end of October 2024. It is the fifth lithium salt production plant that GEA has supplied to the POSCO Group.
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