Nickel recovery from precipitate of NCA lithium-ion battery leach liquor by using disodium ethylene diamine tetraacetate

The nickel cobalt aluminium oxides (NCA) type Li-ion battery is a type of battery currently used in electric vehicles. The UGM battery team has recycled this type of battery to obtain high purity lithium metal. Aside from lithium, the NCA battery contains high-value metals, nickel is one of them. This experiment aims to test the ease of nickel to chelate with disodium ethylene diamine tetraacetate (EDTA). The experiment was carried out by means of a triple neck flask for 4 hours. The samples were taken at certain minutes and then fitted using a pseudo homogeneous first-order reaction equation. The chelate formed was further processed through multilevel precipitation or electrodialysis to separate nickel. Based on the experiment, nickel formed chelates optimally at 60 C using 0.086 M EDTA with the reaction constant for nickel being 1.4819 min-1. The Arrhenius constant and activation energy for nickel were 3.48 1011min-1 and 76,907 J/mole, respectively.