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With demand for rare earth metals and other components for electric vehicle (EV) batteries exploding and supplies shrinking, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has tested one possible solution.
It created an automated disassembly line for used EV batteries.
Even though EVs make up a sliver of the world’s vehicle fleet, there’s a growing backlog of spent lithium-ion EV battery packs piling up for disposal, ORNL scientists note.
However, as yet, only about 5 percent of the world’s lithium batteries are recycled and those that can be are disassembled manually.
ORNL’s robotic line is out to change that.
The auto-disassembler can be configured to break down any design of EV battery stack, take out individual batteries to refurbish for energy storage in home or grid power packs, or disassemble batteries completely to reclaim lithium and other key materials.
It then can extract those materials, using a process ORNL has already developed.
In a key step, the robotic line can quickly take off the battery’s casing even if there’s a charge still in the battery. If a person is doing the task, the battery has to go through a tedious process to discharge all remaining current first, which can be as high as 900 volts.
The robo-recycler also shields humans from toxic fumes and materials batteries can give off when they’re being taken apart.
ORNL’s robotic disassembler can process 100 or more battery packs in the time it now takes to break down and recycle a dozen power packs manually, ORNL’s research data shows.
Next, ORNL is engineering its line to commercial scale and working on a version that can automatically reclaim the parts of an EV drive train, including steel, copper, rare earth magnets, and usable electronic components.
TRENDPOST: ORNL’s automated disassembler closes a loop that’s crucial to ensuring that the EV industry will be sustainable as well as being more acceptable to consumers.
The mature EV industry will include another loop, one in which auto dealers accept spent battery packs from consumers and send them to automated recycling plants that automakers own so they keep control of ever-scarcer minerals.