Fabrication of Porous Functional Monolithic Aerogels with High-Temperature Insulating and Emi Shielding Properties from Spent Lead-Acid Battery Anode: A High-Value Utilization Approach

The safe disposal of spent lead-acid batteries currently attracted great concern worldwide. Developing new treatment technologies is important to deal with the impending explosion of spent lead-acid batteries. This work highlights a novel approach to fabricate porous functional monolithic aerogels (PFMA) from spent lead paste anode materials. PFMA is prepared by a simple sol-gel method by reacting the anode material with AlCl3·6H2O and C8H12O8Zr at low temperature (98 oC). Aluminum dihydrogen phosphate (AHP) is introduced as a binding agent for high-temperature reactions. The obtained PFMA is monolithic and has good thermal insulation and electromagnetic interference (EMI) shielding properties. The thermal conductivity of PFMA is approximate 0.16 W/(m·K), similar with high-temperature resistant ceramic materials of Al2O3-ZrO2 and Al2O3-Cr2O3. PFMA with a thickness of 16 mm was heated in a butane blowtorch (~1300 oC) for 3 min, and the front surface temperature only increased to 140 oC. Moreover, PFMA exhibits great EMI shielding performance in the range of 12-18 GHz, which corresponds to the satellite and radar bands, suggesting that PFMA has good potential applications in this field. It is expected that this work may provide a novel alternative strategy for fabricating high-value functional ceramic aerogels from spent lead-acid batteries.