ALEXANDRIA, Va., March 17 -- United States Patent no. 12,577,636, issued on March 17, was assigned to Mitsubishi Materials Corp. (Tokyo).
"Method for separating cobalt and nickel" was invented by Atsushi Miyazaki (Iwaki, Japan) and Hiroki Muraoka (Iwaki, Japan).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "What is provided is a method for separating cobalt and nickel including: a crushing and sorting step of crushing and classifying the lithium ion secondary battery to obtain an electrode material containing at least cobalt, nickel, copper, and lithium; a leaching step of immersing the electrode material in a processing liquid containing sulfuric acid and hydrogen peroxide to obtain a leachate; a copper sepa...