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.
Products & Technologies
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Evaporation Plants
Advanced systems integrating all components of a thermal separation process plant, utilizing various types of evaporators and heat treatment to optimize energy efficiency and economic viability in industrial processes. GEA specializes in crafting bespoke evaporation solutions that precisely match each client's requirements, prioritizing cost-effe...
Fluid Beds
Fluid bed technology is a core technology of GEA. We supply several different types of Fluid Bed units for application within food and dairy products, chemicals and pharmaceuticals. All are applied for drying and/or cooling of particles - powders, agglomerates or pellets - and for production of agglomerates and granulates from fine powders.
Solution Crystallization Plants
Well-suited for most applications and large capacities. Different crystallizer types and arrangements for the desired particle size.
Spray Dryers
No one knows more about spray drying than GEA. Our expertise has been gained over close to a century, during which time we have designed and supplied more than 10,000 GEA spray drying plants all over the world, and carried out tests for customers in different industries.
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GEA Insights
The breakthrough that changed spray drying
In 1976, NIRO engineers responded to a competitive challenge by rethinking what spray drying could do. Their idea became the multi-stage dryer MSD. Fifty years later, the same fundamental principle helps turn liquids into the powders used in essential nutrition products and important medicines around the world. Refined through decades of engineering expertise, customer insight and continuous development, MSD is a story of innovation with lasting impact.
Beyond the machine: unlocking better plant performance
An efficient machine does not automatically make an efficient factory. Real improvement often starts by looking beyond individual equipment and understanding how processes, energy systems and operating decisions affect one another. It’s a holistic approach designed to uncover opportunities that might otherwise be missed.
How a valve reshapes the way food and drinks are made
In food and beverage plants, valves are commonly operated using compressed air. GEA Hydract® Actuation Technology moves valves with water instead, in a closed, digitally controlled circuit. The result is a valve that can be held exactly in place and steered in fine-tuned steps. This results in lower energy use and greater control.
