Research Projects

Laptops and mobiles containing Li-ion batteries (LIB) are burgeoning in the energy sector, but the discarding of spent LIB creates a major obstacle in waste management and environmental protection. Thus, transforming spent LIBs into efficient catalysts might be promising to address the scarcity in metals as well as clean energy challenges. In contrast to hydrometallurgy and pyrometallurgical process, extraction of transition metals from LIBs by using appropriate solvent/chelators is a long-lasting research problem. The efficiency of such a process depends on the choice of solvent mixture and the polarity of the solvents. Deep eutectic solvents (DESs) are promising as new mixed solvent system capable of recovering metals from electronic waste in an eco-friendly way, however remains unexplored. Keeping this in mind, we are aiming to develop a novel solvent system consisting of hydrogen bond donors and acceptors for recovering metals from LIBs at the initial stage of this project. It would be critical to control the DESs to find the optimum recovery of metals from LIBs. The recovered metal was further calcined at high temperature to convert it to corresponding oxides. Besides, additional metals may be added for converting into binary or ternary mixed metal oxides and alloy materials as the probable anode catalyst. On the other hand, plastic products are globally increasing at an alarming rate, thereby causing detrimental consequences on the environment. Although plastic waste can be recycled traditionally yet has some fundamental issues regarding the downgraded quality of the recycled plastics are produced, which restricts plastic recycling. Although, pre-treatment of several stable plastic wastes like polyurethane (PU), polylactone (PL) and polyester may be converted into inseparable mixtures of monomers, yet the monomer mixture has low merit due to possess poor separation ability owing to high boiling point of the precursors. Hence, an attractive route may be suitable which could provide value-addition to the pre-treated plastic precursors. In this regard, electrochemical conversion of plastics has some merit since the electrical energy from this process is produced from renewable sources (solar, wind, tidal), so consumes less energy than traditional methods. However, the design of stable electrocatalyst may suffer from severe drawbacks, like poor stability, leaching of active sites from the support, expensive synthesis steps, and low selectivity of the desired products. Further research proved that metal composition and the stoichiometry of metal/ligand ratio has fundamental importance in designing a stable anode catalyst from LIBs. Under such circumstances, selective conversion of plastics into methanol, or formic acid from waste battery-derived catalysts might be commercially advantageous.