ALBATROSS - Advanced Light-Weight Battery Systems Optimized for Fast Charging, Safety, and Second-Life Application

Funded by the European Union's H2020 research and innovation program.

ALBATROSS was a Horizon 2020-funded project developing an integrated set of technologies to extend and optimize the lifecycle of electric vehicle (EV) batteries — spanning battery module and tray design, thermal and battery management systems, and end-of-life strategies — validated through a full vehicle demonstrator built around a BMW i3 platform.

Within this consortium, NTNU led Work Package 5: Dismantling, Second Life, Re-use and Recycle, focused on what happens to EV batteries once their first life in a vehicle ends. This work package developed and validated a semi-automatic robotic battery dismantling cell at laboratory scale, designed to safely and efficiently disassemble battery packs for further processing. In parallel, the team developed secondary-use and reuse approaches — including system design and communication gateway concepts for repurposing batteries into second-life applications — as well as hardware and software algorithms leveraging big data to determine individual cells' state of health (SOH), state of safety (SOS), and end-of-life (EoL) status.

On recycling, the work package produced a comprehensive review of existing battery recycling technologies — covering discharging, dismantling, thermal pre-treatment, pyrometallurgy, hydrometallurgy, and direct recycling routes — and identified hydrometallurgy as the most effective approach for recovering battery-grade materials, while flagging key shortcomings in conventional flowsheets: significant lithium losses, cumbersome multi-step separation and purification, and heavy reliance on hydrogen peroxide and alkalis such as NaOH. Building on these findings, the team designed and validated at laboratory scale a novel, compact, closed-loop hydrometallurgical process. This included optimized caustic leaching for selective lithium recovery, CO₂-based crystallization routes for high-purity lithium carbonate production, and a streamlined flowsheet using nickel matte as a novel reducing agent, counter-current leaching for pH neutralization, combined solvent extraction and precipitation for grouped (rather than individual) metal separation, and a solvent-extraction/antisolvent-crystallization route for lithium up-concentration — culminating in successful resynthesis of NMC622 cathode active material from recovered precursors. This work informed recommendations for a more energy- and chemical-efficient, higher-purity recycling route for EV battery cathode materials.
The outputs of WP5 fed directly into the project's final vehicle-level demonstrator (WP6), where the second-life suitability of battery packs was assessed based on their measured state of health at end of life, and into the project's life cycle and sustainability analysis (WP7). ALBATROSS's results have since informed a number of peer-reviewed publications on EV battery degradation, state-of-health estimation, and strategies for extending battery first life and enabling circular, second-life use — supporting the wider push toward more sustainable, circular management of EV batteries at scale.