The disassembly of lithium-ion battery systems from automotive applications is a complex and therefore time and cost consuming process due to a wide variety of the battery designs, flexible components like cables, and potential dangers caused by high voltage and the chemicals contained in the battery cells.
The state of the art battery modules need to be analysed with regards to their structure, components and the relationship of the components to each other. In particular, the key challenges in battery module disassembly up to cell level are identified and classified in order to systematically derive the requirements for the disassembly system.
Kay et al. presented the process of battery disassembly using industrial robots under the supervision of human workers. Experiments were performed on the disassembly of dummy modules and dummy cells, which demonstrated that the process time required for automated opening of the modules and cells could be reduced by 50%.
The laboratory experience showed that the complete disassembly of a battery cell took 20 min . A summary regarding this category of publications can be found in Table 5. The analysis of the above-mentioned publications thereby highlights the fundamental challenges that exist in automated disassembly of LIBs.
An energy-storage system comprised of lithium-ion battery modules is considered to be a core component of new energy vehicles, as it provides the main power source for the transmission system. However, manufacturing defects in battery modules lead to variations in performance among the cells used in series or parallel configuration.
The total cost per pack disassembly into modules ranges from EUR 80 to 110, depending on the size of the disassembly plants, in Germany. Rallo et al. considered the laboratory scale and determined a total cost of EUR 1325 to disassemble the Smart ForFour battery pack into cells.