Economic analysis of the disassembling activities to the reuse of electric vehicles Li-ion batteries

Electric vehicles (EVs) are massively entering the mobility services. However, the high costs of their batteries, and thus of the vehicles, represent a real barrier that refrain consumers from buying EVs. In order to reduce the EV costs, research on recovery battery to be reused in a second life for stationary use is being explored, as it this is expected to decrease the cost of these batteries (second life) is being considered for additional stationary uses. For this purpose, specific conditioning (disassembling and repurposing) activities on the battery need to be undertaken to enable a further use of Li-ion batteries once they have completed their duty life in a vehicle (first life). Since economy matters, the economic aspects of these activities need to be analysed to fully understand the economic feasibility of the second life as a key element to that will determine the success of the implementation of EVs. This paper investigates the current state of art of the disassembling activities by analysing the Smart ForFour Li-ion battery and provides insights of the costs of each disassembling operation, from battery level to cell level. Another key aspect will be the remanufacturing at battery level as it presents some advantages over either module or cell level such as a less time is required and consequently a fewer cost. On the other hand, the reuse at module level presents interesting advantages such as the chance to design more versatile and scalable solutions, which could be more interesting despite their initial drawbacks for many second life applications. Therefore, the disassembling costs will play an important role in the repurposed battery selling prices.