The retirement trend of power batteries has spurred a trillion dollar market for cascading utilization and resource regeneration. This article constructs a full lifecycle technical and economic model to quantitatively analyze the commercial value of different paths.

1. Tiered utilization technology system

State of Health (SOH) assessment: Incremental Capacity Analysis (ICA) and Electrochemical Impedance Spectroscopy (EIS) were used for joint diagnosis, with a SOH prediction error of less than 3%.

Restructuring and Group Technology:

Communication base station scenario: Reorganize retired batteries into 48V50Ah modules with a cycle life of>3000 times and a cost of 0.35 yuan per kilowatt hour

Home energy storage scenario: adopting a 10kWh liquid cooling cabinet design, system efficiency of 92%, investment payback period of 5 years

2. Innovation in Resource Recycling Technology

Pyrometallurgical process: Lithium is recovered through vacuum distillation with a recovery rate of 85%, but the energy consumption can reach up to 3000 kWh/ton LCE.

Wet metallurgical process:

Sulfuric acid system leaching: Lithium leaching rate is 92%, but it requires the consumption of 3 tons of H ₂ SO ₄/ton of waste

New type of ionic liquid extraction: using [P ₆₆₆₆₁₄] [TFA] ionic liquid, with a lithium nickel cobalt separation coefficient>1000 and a purity of battery grade

Direct regeneration technology:

Lithium iron phosphate cathode material: By supplementing lithium with Li ₂ CO ∝ and carbon thermal reduction, the capacity recovery rate is 95%, and the cost is 40% lower than that of new materials

Ternary material: using hydrogen reduction water washing process to remove impurities while maintaining layered structure, with a cyclic performance degradation of less than 10%

3. Economic boundary conditions

Economic turning point of tiered utilization: When the price of lithium batteries is greater than 0.8 yuan/Wh and the SOH of retired batteries is greater than 70%, the cost of tiered utilization per kilowatt hour is lower than that of new batteries.

Break even point for resource regeneration: When the lithium price exceeds 150000 yuan/ton, the net profit margin of the wet recycling process reaches 12%; When the lithium price is less than 80000 yuan/ton, the pyrometallurgical process incurs losses.