In the hydrometallurgical stage of battery recycling, a strongly alkaline environment is key to separating and extracting valuable metals. However, intense chemical reactions and material interactions often generate large amounts of stubborn foam. This foam not only overflows tanks, causing material loss and site contamination, but also seriously hinders solid-liquid separation and reduces the effective volume of reaction vessels, lowering overall process efficiency and raising costs. Traditional defoaming methods often provide only short-lived effects and cannot withstand the harsh conditions of high alkalinity and high temperature; frequent additions instead introduce new variables and costs.
To address this industry pain point, Chemi Tech has developed a series of defoamers specifically designed for strong-alkali systems in battery recycling. The core of our solution lies in the high compatibility of the product's chemical structure with strong-alkali environments. Its specially designed molecules can rapidly penetrate and break the surface tension of the foam film for fast defoaming; at the same time, it disperses stably in the liquid phase to provide durable foam suppression, tolerating high temperatures and high ionic strength to prevent secondary foaming.
The application steps are clear and simple. First, our technical engineers will evaluate foam samples based on your specific process conditions, such as alkali concentration, temperature, and agitation intensity, and recommend the most suitable defoamer model and initial dosing point. It is generally recommended to make the first addition at process nodes prone to foaming, such as the early stage of the leaching reaction or the inlet of a transfer pump. Dosing can be done by direct dropwise addition or continuous injection of a diluted solution through a metering pump, with an extremely small dosage, typically only a few ten-thousandths to thousandths of the total system volume, to achieve significant results. We will then assist with on-site follow-up and optimize the dosing strategy to ensure stable defoaming at the lowest cost.
We once helped a customer focused on ternary battery material recycling solve a foam problem in its lithium hydroxide leaching stage. Under high-temperature, concentrated-alkali conditions, the foam layer often exceeded 30 cm in thickness, seriously affecting production. After adopting a Chemi Tech customized defoamer, the first addition brought the foam layer below 5 cm within ten minutes, and continuous eight-hour operation was achieved without any top-up. This change increased the single-tank processing efficiency by about 15% and greatly reduced the material cleanup work caused by foam overflow. The customer gave positive feedback on the stability and controllability of production.
Choosing Chemi Tech means choosing not just a product but a reliable partner for production process optimization. We are committed to helping battery recycling enterprises overcome strong-alkali foam obstacles, unleash line potential, and achieve more stable and economical operations with professional, efficient, and long-lasting defoaming solutions.