The dismantling of the spent alkaline zinc manganese dioxide batteries and the recovery of the zinc from the anodic material

• Published in: Journal of power sources 2001-10, Vol.101 (2), p.182-187
• Main Authors: Vatistas, N, Bartolozzi, M, Arras, S
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Alkaline batteries; Applied sciences; Battery dismantling; Direct energy conversion and energy accumulation; Electrical engineering. Electrical power engineering; Electrical power engineering; Electrochemical conversion: primary and secondary batteries, fuel cells; Exact sciences and technology; Zinc electrodeposition; Zinc recovery
• ISSN: 0378-7753; 1873-2755
• DOI: 10.1016/S0378-7753(01)00710-8

The existing plants for the recovery of exhausted alkaline zinc manganese dioxide batteries adopt an initial heat treatment and then a grinding. The last operation intermixtures the components of the batteries and consequently the successive recovery process proves to be rather complicate and needs a large scale plant. An initial dismantling and separation of the anodic, cathodic and packing components allow a successively easier recovery process and a small scale plant. This possibility has been assumed in this work and a simple recovery process has been proposed for the anodic material, consisting of an initial leaching step to separate and recover the unconverted metallic zinc and a successive step of cathodic deposition to recover the converted ionic zinc. A highly efficient zinc recovery has been obtained at the cathodic deposition step by adopting a heat treatment of the anodic material before its leaching process.