US Patent Issued to UT-Battelle on June 30 for "Recycling and upcycling of nickel-based lithium cathode materials" (Tennessee Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., July 16 -- United States Patent no. 12,671,123, issued on June 30, was assigned to UT-Battelle LLC (Oak Ridge, Tenn.).

"Recycling and upcycling of nickel-based lithium cathode materials" was invented by Sheng Dai (Knoxville, Tenn.), Huimin Luo (Knoxville, Tenn.), Bishnu P. Thapaliya (Knoxville, Tenn.) and Tao Wang (Knoxville, Tenn.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A method for processing spent nickel-based cathode material useful in lithium-based batteries, the method comprising: (i) producing an initial mixture containing the spent nickel-based cathode material and a molten salt system comprising cations and anions, wherein the cations comprise lithium cations; (ii) heating th...