Recycling spent graphite anodes into a graphite/graphene oxide composite via plasma solution treatment for reuse in lithium-ion batteries

Lithium-ion batteries production increase ultimately leads to toxic waste. Today, recycling of the spent lithium-ion batteries becomes extremely important with much attention paid to recycling of cathode materials. Graphite recovery receives less attention due to low economic benefits, high costs of material cleaning and low cycling stability. In fact, regenerating graphite with low-cost technology is of great importance to solve the problem of recycling spent graphite and environmental contamination. This paper presents a variant of graphite recycling using low-cost plasma solution treatment (less than 28 kWh·kggraphite-1), leading to a capacitive and powerful material. The results were confirmed by cycling of cells based on recycled graphite for 500 cycles at 0.3 A·g-1 with excellent stability and high capacity (392 mAh·g-1), which is greater than the graphite theoretical capacity due to the formation of graphene oxide from the surface graphite layers. The treatment duration does not affect the interplanar distance of the obtained graphites. Long cycling shows a change in the shape of the charge curves with a graphene fraction increase. For all samples the kinetic characteristics were also evaluated: the dependence of the diffusion coefficient, SEI resistance and charge transfer resistance on the potential and the intercalation rate constant.