Separating Cobalt From Nickel (Cobalt From Li-ion Batteries - Part 4)

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With this last separation, the basics of the lithium-ion battery extraction come to a close. With the mixture of cobalt/nickel metal that we made in the last instalment, we apply a solvent extraction process to separate the two metals from each other.
As it turns out (and as many suspected), there's a lot more cobalt than nickel in our sample, but nickel is still a significant component.
To check out the other videos in this series, check out this playlist:
• Extracting Lithium/Cob...
This video was sponsored by Brilliant.

[@ScrapScience]

To try everything Brilliant has to offer-free-for a full 30 days, visit brilliant.org/ScrapScience . The first 200 of you will get 20% off Brilliant’s annual premium subscription.

[@stormeagle28]

These annoying advertisings of the same shitty internet sites (brilliant, squarespace, nordvpn, audible, jlcpcb or yfood) really suck. Big time. I'll start giving negative votings for this crap. I miss the times when KZbin videos weren't a business for everyone. It's just annoying.

[@charleschidsey2831]

Transition metal chemistry is quite beautiful. Well done.

[@emanuelsavini4743]

U can heat the nickel solution and add a few grams of oxalic acid to precipitate it's oxalato-complex which readily decarboxilates upon heating to the reduced metal in powder (probably micropowder). It works with many 2+ metals!

[@VladimirBasus]

Fantastic presentation!! I am a retired organic chemistry professor, not inorganic chemistry, and I found it very interesting and informative video.

[@ScrapScience]

That's awesome. Glad you enjoyed it!

[@patrickmanasco5905]

I’ve always loved organic chemistry without even stopping to wonder what inorganic chem really was

[@terawattyear]

I learned a lot. Thanks; you’re a good patient teacher.

[@PS-vk6bn]

The colors in that separatory funnel look really beautiful.

[@MobiusHorizons]

Really enjoyed the explanation. Clearly you are just scratching the surface of some very complex topics, but it really helped to understand what you were doing. Also this was some seriously beautiful chemistry

[@Enjoymentboy]

One of the things I find this series to be very good at is illustrating just why the recycling of these batteries is not easy. Until this process is streamlines and simplified it will remain more cost effective for battery manufacturers to keep buying newly mined minerals. That's one of the reasons why I have been saying for years that battery manufacturers should be legally mandated to take their own batteris back once end of life has been reached. Require them to be responsible for proper disposal and recycling. Once that happens they will have the financial incentive to actually fix this process.

[@benjaminmemcic4434]

Please continue the li-ion chemistry.

[@g-radical349]

woohoo! I've been waiting for you to pick this project back up!!

[@silenkosimasuku2286]

Nickel can be precipitated out with a solution of dimetylglyoxime (DMG), a red precipitate will be observed and thus nickel complex with DMG forming nickel bis-DMG complex.

[@Duck.1]

Very cool and colorful chemistry! and I really appreciate the explanations.

[@andrewhaychemistry]

Wonderful colours, almost as good as your background chemistry explanations. Top work, thanks.

[@ommalakar295]

Extract potassium metal from potash alum. 🙏

[@TeslaFactory]

Fascinating stuff as always! Can't wait for your next video, bro 😊👍

[@christopherleubner6633]

To get the lithium use carbonated water. The lithium will dissolve in it but other stuff won't. Next step shred the electrode strips and recover the aluminum and copper foils while removing the separator plastics. Next step roast the electrode powders to remove plastic residues and digest in acids. The cathode material is graphite so if you know which is which you can separate and discard that one after the lithium extraction steps. The anode is made of Cu2CoO3 mixed with graphite and that can be separated to yield copper and cobalt. There isn't usually Ni in the mix of the batteries save for the tabs

[@peterpan420]

Thank you ,for information 👍🖖🕵️

[@peterpan420]

Thank you 👍👍👍👍🕵️been looking for that information !!!

[@SomeMorganSomewhere]

Nice transition into the sponsor bit :)

[@davidfetter]

Yay for inorganic chemistry! I don't suppose Brilliant does a lot of the group theory and the inorganic chemistry that leans on same, but I'm happy to suppose wrong.

[@Alberto_Travagin]

Super interesting series! Just a question: can you make a video about the production of persulfates with electrolysis?

[@ScrapScience]

One day, yes! I don’t have current plans for it, and it might not be for a very long while, but I want to give this a go one day.

[@mostaprsio4497]

Amazing and coolest video i have ever seen about chemistry , could u please make the next video about extracting Manganese from Zinc Bettery

[@rescuerferret8326]

One interesting idea for future video would be coating titanium electrode with lead dioxide. That could then be used in a perchlorate cell as an anode.

[@ScrapScience]

As interesting as it would be, lead dioxide and lead-based electrodes are something I'd much prefer to steer well clear of these days. The toxicity is simply far too much for me to work with for my current setup.

[@ayabrea3762]

Good job.please make a video about sepration nickel from iron with extractant.

[@peterpan420]

Lithium is in the first water,when soaking contents of battery's . Just distillery off the water for lithium salts

[@sxl168]

I've been looking for a way to do cobalt/nickel separation with out needing Cyanex 272 for a while now. Good to see that this method looks promising. Unless someone has a good lead on where to obtain Cyanex 272 or equivalent that is fairly easy to obtain.

[@alllove1754]

You can also get Cobalt from cat litter, the kind that changes color when they pee. The blue chunks turn pink when wet. Those are Cobalt based.

[@MSteamCSM]

I hope you will get xrf spectrometer eventually - it's invaluable tool for this kind of experiments.

[@ScrapScience]

I'll have to look around and try to find someone who will run a sample for me or something, haha.

[@MSteamCSM]

@@ScrapScience You can send in to me, I'm in Ukraine, lmao

[@ommalakar295]

Extract potassium metal from potash alum.

[@SciDOCMBC]

You've done a really good job. I've seen a lot of KZbinrs trying to do the same but they have failed miserably. Nevertheless, a warning to all who want to try it. Cobalt and nickel salts are extremely toxic and extraction leaves a lot of contaminated waste. Please do not throw this waste in the household waste or pour it down the drain. With a few grams of a cobalt salt you can destroy an entire ecosystem.

[@niggacockball7995]

Hey at least with that much cobalt you get a life time supply of B12 vitamin

[@dalitas]

solvent extraction is an amazing technique, it was born out of necessity to extract and purify fission products in the early 1900s since their chemistry is very similar.

[@interstellarsurfer]

I'm fairly certain it predates the discovery of fission. They were using similar methods to separate the lanthanides in the 1800's.

[@ficolas2]

Nuclear nerd fren

[@GAMEDATA1010]

I am loving the idea of turning batteries into their component elements I've been watching some of your older videos too and was wondering if you were planning on doing anything with using the chlorine gas generated in some of your experiments and turning it into anything useful like hydrochloric acid or maybe trying to produce plastics like PVC via the chlorination of ethylene then dechlorination just something other than scrubbing because I feel like that's some good science waiting to be explored

[@ScrapScience]

Glad you like the separation! I've always been somewhat keen to try making hydrochloric acid with the chlorine and hydrogen from a chloralkali cell, but it's a dangerous enough experiment that I don't have any current plans on doing it in the near future. It's definitely something that will always be in the back of my mind though, so I'll likely get to it one day. Using the chlorine for chlorinations is a little beyond my expertise, since I'm not particularly comfortable with organic reactions, and there are much better ways to make chlorine gas for something like that. Either way, I'm hoping to try hydrochloric acid production at some point, but I can't make any promises at this stage.

[@willi80636]

very impressive. Thanks for the video 👍🏼

[@DimasFajar-ns4vb]

good job sir

[@zachreyhelmberger894]

Thank you for making this video!!

[@carlokemp4890]

Could you make Dicyanin dye please. I really want to make aura glass.

[@chanheosican6636]

Really cool. I want to dissolve a gold bar into Aqua regas and use Nickle salts and copper electode. Plate gold onto titanium.

[@DanielSMatthews]

Very interesting. The boiling point of lithium is 1330 °C so you could distil it from aluminium, perhaps, using a jet of burning hydrogen that is a bit rich in H2 so that it is reducing.

[@ScrapScience]

The only trouble there (aside from the difficulty of that distillation) is that the lithium and aluminium would have to be in the form of metals to do that, and turning them into their metallic forms is much harder than separating them chemically, haha. (Also note that in the batteries themselves, lithium isn't actually in its metallic form either). When in solution, it's actually pretty straightforward to precipitate the aluminum as the hydroxide, leaving the lithium behind (though I suppose I actually tried that in the second episode and it didn't work, hmmm...)

[@DanielSMatthews]

@@ScrapScience Just thought that the H2 in excess would do the job of converting lithium to metal for you.

[@thenorm8489]

just reading "chemistry for those that don t know" dummies is such a strong word...but yeh i m understanding the terms...never knew chemistry was all bout atoms n electrons n bonding,,, what world

[@Bennyboy-dog]

When can I bring my old phone cells to you? On a serious note, this is so close! Do you think this process could be industrialised to extract all valuable elements from Li Ion batteries and do you think it could be an economically viable approach?

[@ScrapScience]

Haha. I'm afraid the process is very far away from being economically viable at this stage. For starters, the cost of electricity for electrowinning the transition metals is already more expensive than the metals themselves, and that doesn't even take into account the costs of the reagents I've used so far, including sulfuric acid, hydrochloric acid, calcium hydroxide, butanone, ammonium persulfate, sodium thiocyanate, and sodium/potassium carbonate. If you can somehow make the electrowinning step more efficient, find some way of effectively recovering the butanone solvent, and get your batteries for free, it could conceivably be useful, but you'd be putting a lot of work into it for a very small profit if so.

[@Bennyboy-dog]

@@ScrapScience I wouldn't even attempt such an undertaking - way over my pay grade, as they say. No, I was asking if this could be close to commercially viable at scale. I don't think the cost of electricity should come into it - just the maintenance and outgoings of a suitable PV array. As for the reagents - can these possibly be recovered using cheap PV electricity?

[@ScrapScience]

Yeah I can definitely see that if you can get free electricity from photovoltaics it might have a better shot. With some development you might be able to recover the butanone from the solvent extraction pretty well, but recovering any of the other reagents (acid, hydroxides, carbonates, thiocyanates) is going to be near impossible since they'll all be used up in the reactions they're involved in. If a business could get free battery waste and free electricity, I could see the possibility of this being viable on a large scale. Still, a lot of research these days is now going towards new efficient processes for separating cobalt and nickel, because this solvent extraction process really doesn't seem to play nicely on large scales (I think).

[@davidfetter]

@@Bennyboy-dog solar is orders of magnitude too diffuse for such a thing. There is, however, a way to use the light of previous suns (well, colliding neutron stars, at any rate) in the form of uranium and similar chonky bois. With that, of which Australia has plenty under the ground and vastly more in the ocean that surrounds it, you do not have to worry about destroying a bunch of delicate ecosystem by shading away the light it depends on with square kilometers of PV panels.

[@Bennyboy-dog]

@@davidfetter Well that may be a way forward, but solar panels are proven and here now. A fission plants is at least 10 years or more before we see an energetic electron from it and fusion is always going to be 20 years away. I hope my negative portrayal of fusion is misplaced however. Even if they cracked it tomorrow, it will still be decades before it delivers any power. As for fission, dirty, limited resource fossil fuels got us into this shit to begin with, so I really don't want to see any fusion power plants doing the same thing.

[@damiangruenberg3188]

You can buy cobalt very very cheap online as a pottery supply

[@herwew7476]

Great video!

[@Nerddaquimica]

Perfect😊

[@paulkurilecz4209]

How difficult is it for you to obtain the glassware. Here in the US, it is almost impossible for an individual to obtain due to the drug laws.

[@ScrapScience]

When I was making this video, it wasn't an issue at all - there were no glassware laws in my location. However, I recently moved to a different state and the laws are a bit different. I'm still looking into the specifics, but I basically need to make my channel a registered business and sign some forms to say I won't be making drugs if I ever want to own any glassware with ground glass joints over here.

[@paulkurilecz4209]

@@ScrapScience tyvm. Basically the US DEA compiled a list of laboratory equipment that can conceivably be used for manufacturing "illegal" drugs. So just about anything ends up on a list. About ten years ago I had to buy some very basic equipment in order to prepare metal etchants for determining the microstructure. Basically, we had to register the company with the DEA, list the equipment that we would be purchasing, describe what it would be used for and where it would be located and utilized.

[@user255]

Are those tetra complexes isolatable as crystal?

[@ScrapScience]

I don't think these particular tetrahedral complexes can be crystallised, at least as far as I'm aware. Maybe with the right counter-ion, it might be possible.

[@NitinKumar-ez3cc]

hallo Sir Please tell me what solvent use for saparetion

[@ScrapScience]

Did you watch the video?

[@NitinKumar-ez3cc]

yes

[@ScrapScience]

@@NitinKumar-ez3cc It's butanone for this particular separation. I talk about it at 7:40 and 11:09, among other places in the video.

[@MIH0319]

Can diethyl ether or ethyl acetate or other organic solvents (immiscible with water) be used instead of butanone? I heard that the cobalt SCN complex is soluble in most organic solvents (although it is really not stable in water).

[@MIH0319]

Also, where did you find those solubility statistics of the coordination complexes in organic solvents? I have personally never encountered them.

[@ScrapScience]

I'd imagine that it's likely for other organic solvents to work, but it's definitely something that would require some testing. I only used butanone because the document I'm following said that it works. I'm afraid I don't have much in terms of solubility tables for inorganic salts/complexes in organic solvents either (there's too much information there to compile neatly, I'd imagine). While limited, old solubility dictionaries like this one can be useful (though they are limited): archive.org/details/dictionaryofchem00comeuoft/

[@MIH0319]

@@ScrapScience Thanks a lot for your reply! I wonder if it is possible to separate ferric ions with cobalt ions by this way (since they both form the thiocyanate complexes). Will the ferric complex dissolve into the organic layer?

[@kreynolds1123]

Wondering if you would like to do direct air electrolisys sometime. Pull moisture out of the air with an ionic desicant and produce hydrogen and oxygen. I could be wrong I think reducing the condensation from air-conditioning may wind up reducing energy cost from air-conditioning. Certainly electrolisys of moisture consumes ebergy but much of that gets stored as chemically as potential energy. But your saving the energy of heat of condensation.

[@ScrapScience]

That might be an idea to visit at some point. What kind of dessicant do you think would work? I'm under the impression that chlorides are a bad idea because I wouldn't really want to be making chlorates or chlorine in the electrolysis, and hydroxides will be a little wasteful since they'll start absorbing CO2 and turning into carbonates.

[@kreynolds1123]

@@ScrapScience what about pure sulpheric acid? It's a powerful hygroscopic electrolyte. Maybe you can easilly make a Sodium silicate bonded fiberglass mesh to provide a high surface area substrate over which you may blow air. Apparently melamine sponges worked for about a weak for researchers, who settled on sintered glass foam and platinum electrodes.

[@ScrapScience]

Hmm, sulfuric acid is definitely a good plan. Do you know what concentration the sulfuric acid will dilute to due to its hygroscopic nature? I'm under the impression that high concentrations of sulfuric acid aren't very conductive and ideally we need it to dilute to a concentration of less than 70% (I'm guessing) to make electrolysis proceed nicely.

[@kreynolds1123]

@@ScrapScience a few things that may become apparent on reflection. The acid concentration will depend on an equilibrium that depends on surface area, mass of air flow, humidity, temperature and the rate water is electrolized depending on many of the same factors as well as the voltage applied and the distance current must flow from one plate to the other. As you pointed out, sulpheric acid is not a great conductor at high concentrations, but as the humidity increases, more water dilutes the sulpheric acid which in turn conducts more current. And The applied voltage effects the current flow. The researches point out this works down to around 4% relative humidity. And a mention that over the concentrations of their work the electrolyte had a -30 something Celsius freezing point sugesting it may work in very cold conditions. There is an article over on nature that graphes the researchers results testing a glass sintered foam with a 15 miliamps cm² electric current with a near linear relationship between concentration and relative humidity at 25c, that ranges from 62% concentration at 20% relative humidity to what appears to be 26.8% concentration at 80% humidity.

[@kreynolds1123]

@@ScrapScience I'll send the link to you in an email. 😁

[@joeylo2302]

Add cobalt and nickel chloride to acetone and it'll leave the nickel salt behind

[@ScrapScience]

Hmmm... interesting. While that would probably work for this particular instance, I'm thinking there are a couple of issues with that kind of separation that I don't really like: 1) When atomically mixed, the cobalt in the cobalt/nickel salts might have a hard time dissolving properly, as the nickel can kind of 'protect' it from touching the solvent (similar to the reasons for requiring inquartation for dissolving gold alloys). With such a low fraction of nickel, this is probably not much of an issue here though. 2) I'm also worried that even small amounts of water (even leftover hydration of the chlorides) could impact the process and bring a bit of nickel into solution. Honestly, I'm not very sure about either of these points though. Do you have any further insight to an acetone separation like this?

[@LukeLiveforphysics]

I'm going to try that myself. Thanks for the tip!

[@gauravbansal2927]

Pls pls pls Make a vedio for seperating nickel and copper from coppernickel Coins.. ratio of caopper to nickel is 75:25

[@chanheosican6636]

Common ion effect is essentially very usrful.

[@leoholberg9776]

I would really want to see sea water electrolysis to make magnesium (or Na, Ca, ...)

[@fredericomba]

The channel has some videos on Sodium (Na) and Calcium (Ca). Here are they: Sodium: kzbin.info/www/bejne/rZOZZoWQnZajqrc Calcium: kzbin.info/www/bejne/gmi7kKlqmb94h9k

[@ScrapScience]

I'll be making magnesium metal in an upcoming video. It's all filmed and everything, but there'll be a wait since there's quite a backlog of videos to get through first. A seawater extraction is definitely not a bad idea, and it's actually something I was considering doing for the magnesium, haha. We'll get there one day hopefully.

[@jimsvideos7201]

It's not every day you get to tie-dye your glassware.

[@flynnmayes8916]

Kate is talking about your yt during maths

[@Daniel-yn2lh]

I don't understand why he had a mixture of all the metals, simply separate the cathode and anode while disassembling. I used hot acetic acid and got lavender colored cobalt acetate solution... I could have added sodium carbonate to get cobalt carbonate and then whatever I want, chloride, nitrate , oxalate, even perchlorate,sulfate, or oxide ( which I can use a aluminum powder thermite reaction to get the metal )etc.. He made it way more work 🤨

[@ScrapScience]

The cathode of a lithium ion battery, in this day and age, does not contain cobalt alone. Generally, it contains a mixed oxide of cobalt, nickel, and magnanese, with a certain amount of lithium ions intercalated depending on the state of charge. Normally, this is all deposited on an aluminium substrate. As such, dissolving up cathodes will give you a mixture of all these metals (Co, Ni, Mn, Al, and Li) in solution. This is exactly what we saw in this series of videos. If using hot acetic acid is all you've done, I can guarantee that you don't have a pure solution of cobalt. What I show in these videos is the amount of work that would be required to actually separate the components of your product.

[@gojohnson2511]

Note to self: if I ever want to use unicorn magic, just do transition metal chem.

[@Rhaxin]

Interesting you got much more Co than Ni since Li-ion batteries has at least 15 times more Ni than Co.

[@ScrapScience]

Yeah, it's definitely a bit weird. Pretty much everyone else I've seen do this kind of extraction has had nickel be the most abundant species in solution after dissolving up the materials. It seems like I've either got batteries which contain an unusually low fraction of cobalt, or maybe my heat treatment and dissolution process is somehow selective for dissolving cobalt over nickel. The latter is unlikely though, since I found that the acid seemed to dissolve almost all of the electrode mass I started with.

[@Rhaxin]

@@ScrapScience I guess you meant to say unusually high fraction of Cobalt, but that would also be highly unlikely unless it was a custom made ultra high end Li-ion battery with a price tag I even don't want to speculate. I'm working with Li-ion battery manufacturing and have been in the business for 15 years and I never heard of ratios like that =)

[@ScrapScience]

Oh yeah whoops - unusually high is what I meant there. These are mostly just batteries out of old iPhones so I doubt they're anything special. Seems like a bit of a mystery. If I ever figure out what's going on, I'll let you know lol.

[@sxl168]

@@ScrapScience It depends on how old the battery is. The initial generation of Li-ion batteries for the first 10-15 years or so used an almost pure LiCoO2 electrode. I have a bunch of said batteries from that era, 1400-1800 mAh Panasonic and Sony cells that have very little Ni in them. Any recent battery made in the past 10-15 years is likely to be a mixed metal NMC or NCA cell. Samsung 29E's and LG MJ1's that I've recently digested are mostly Ni with small amounts of Co and Mn.

[@johnslugger]

*I am a refiner for Kena-metal corp. You made many mistakes. #1. You should always "BAG" or anode and cathode in poly bags to amplify the electro-chemical reactions. #2. There is a chemical that will ONLY dissolve Cobalt but not Nickle. I can't tell you since these are industrial secrets but hopefully knowing how it is done in INDUSTRY will help you 'Hunt" for what it is. You did it the hard way. Good Luck.*

[@ScrapScience]

I love how your comments just get more ridiculous and nonsensical every time. lol

[@devangrudani9366]

This is an open source and access to all platform, not like your industrial robber barons.

[@mazewindstudios255]

woahh

[@dmiles3270]

Turn it to metal

[@davidjones6661]

Transition metal chemistry in a pleasant accent.... and it doesn't contain enough azides to force the chemist to use plastic labware? This sounds suspicious!

[@Jkauppa]

how many times you need to go to store to do the things you do, one at store all at store, hmh

[@Jkauppa]

brilliant

[@Jkauppa]

lithium is hiding from you lulz

[@Jkauppa]

electrolytic Silicon metal from SiCl4 route (SiO2 + C -> Si +CO2, then purify the silicon through molten SiCl4 electrorefining route)

[@alish5417]

Say hi to hidrogen fuel cells ,bro lets worlk ,me qnd you to build a in pocket fusion reactor,and leave tjis tocic dangerous buisness ,aim on nuclear energy ,these batteries are not for too long ,letw minimize a fusion reactor to the size of a pack of cigarrett ,then comes the robots geek and start a new war with humqn race macjlhinew xhumans ,no skynet will never prevail

[@EKROTResearchorganizatio-px2bn]

Extract potassium metal from potash alum.

[@OmMalakar-zw4iw]

Extract potassium metal from potash alum.

[@LaluPrasad-zt8sl]

Extract potassium metal from potash alum.