Acid leaching and kinetics study of cobalt recovery from spent lithium-ion batteries with nitric acid

Department of Chemical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Universitas Indonesia, Depok 16424, Indonesia

^* Coresponding author: usman@che.ui.ac.id

Abstract

Relentless development of technology triggers the smartphone production. The increasing number of smartphone use is followed by escalation of its waste, where its battery is usually left unrecycled. The analysis of the battery content shows that it is consist of a considerable amount of cobalt that can be reutilized based on its relatively high economic value, which valued USD 61/kg. Leaching as a form of hydrometallurgy was used in this research to recover cobalt using HNO₃ as leaching agent and H₂O₂ as reducing agent. Process optimization was done by varying concentration of nitric acid and reaction temperature. The result showed that the optimum leaching condition was earned in 30 minutes of leaching reaction using 3.0 M HNO₃ at the reaction temperature of 90°C, resulting 98.01% of cobalt leaching efficiency. Reaction kinetics study was also done in this research and the result demonstrates that recovery of cobalt from spent lithium-ion battery by nitric acid leaching was controlled by diffusion through product layer with activation energy value of 44.67 kJ/mol.