• hydrometallurgical process
• life cycle assessment
• lithium-ion batteries
• pyrometallurgical process
• recycling

In recent years, EU has considered the electrification of road transports as a valuable means of slowing down global warming. The exponential spread of electric vehicles will need to be supported by the development of suitable facilities able to handle spent LIBs, and characterized by good recovery efficiency parameters, especially for materials on the CRMs list.
In this thesis, two LIBs recycling processes are investigated: a pyrometallurgical process and a co-precipitation/hydrometallurgical process. The unit operations of both are simulated through a code written in Python in order to obtain the material and energy inputs and outputs of the two processes.
Starting from these material and energy balances, a tool that allow the use of different calculation rules, by which recycling performance indicators can be estimated, is developed. The tool developed makes also possible to identify critical points in the simulated processes by means of a sensitivity analysis performed on the parameters of greatest interest.
A further target of LIBs recycling is to globally reduce the environmental impacts generated by the production of LIBs. In this thesis a LCA analysis is carried out using the SimaPro 9.4.0.2 software in order to determine the environmental impacts due to the recycling of LIBs in the two processes simulated and to identify the most critical operations from an environmental point of view.