Recovery of nickel and cobalt by pyrometallurgical process of waste from producing program of nickel metal hydride batteries

With the great increasing use of nickel metal hydride batteries recently, the waste of this kind batteries have been paid for close consideration. For the main reason that the waste of the batteries contained precious metals and lanthanide which cost great lose. This paper introduces the pyrometallurgical process of recovering nickel and cobalt from the waste of the nickel metal hydride batteries. Particularly, the waste for the process was from factory during the producing program. The use of designed solvent to divide nickel and cobalt in melted state from the waste is described. Also, the result of the nickel and cobalt and melted gangue that mainly consist of lanthanide oxide are included in details. The aim of the paper is to find out a simple and feasible way to reuse waste from nickel metal hydride batteries. 500 kg production waste samples were supplied for experiment by Liaoning King powers Advanced Materials Co. Ltd, China. Wastes Batteries were then dismantled and the components were separately freed. Of course the original waste was in the condition of mingle. The main idea of the process in this paper is to separate Ni, cobalt metals from other metals by pyrometallurgical attempt. The waste, however, is not homogeneous, which may not help to form a stable and balanceable scorification system in future experimental process. Hence the first step of these experiments is to mash the original wastes into smaller powder by mechanical method.Chemicals The chemicals used in this work were of Chemical pure grade.