Sustainable cathode material selection in lithium-ion batteries using a novel hybrid multi-criteria decision-making

Nowadays, energy supply chains have been entangled with many factors (e.g., overconsumption, depletion of fossil fuels, and contamination of natural resources). Besides, many efforts have been made to discern different sources of renewable energy (e.g., photovoltaic solar energy, biomass energy, and various metals for energy storage). Among the metals, lithium has been more used in different industries, particularly the lithium-ion batteries (LIBs), due to their very high reactivity and lightweight. LIBs are energy storage systems containing an electrolyte, anode, cathode, current collector, and separator. The cathode is characterized as the most significant part of LIBs since it has a significant impact on the main features of the battery (e.g., power, energy density, and lifetime). In this study, the evaluation of cathode materials is investigated based on a set of economic, environmental, and tactical criteria in three main phases. In the first phase, a hybrid multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) based on subjective, objective, and combined weights including SAW-AHP, SAW-CILOS, SAW-AHP-CILOS, TOPSIS-AHP, TOPSIS-CILOS, TOPSIS-AHP-CILOS, CoCoSo-AHP, CoCoSo-CILOS, CoCoSo-AHPCILOS, MARCOS-AHP, MARCOS-CILOS, and MARCOS-AHP-CILOS methods is developed and the performance of cathode materials is evaluated based on the final ranking of alternatives (FRA) and Copeland methodologies. In the second phase, using the efficient and anti-efficient frontiers determined by the data envelopment analysis (DEA) model, the performance of cathode materials is evaluated. In the third phase, the performance of the three proposed methodologies is compared. The results of this study demonstrate that the hybrid MCDM-FRA methodology is more flexible than the modified DEA model and hybrid MCDM-Copeland method to address the sustainable cathode material selection problem.