Advances in battery recycling

Advances in battery recycling

There is currently still a lot of manual work to be done to dismantle electric car batteries for possible recycling. The “BattBox” research project, which is unique in Austria, aims to automate and thereby accelerate this procedure. The institutions FILL, TU Graz, AVL and Automobil-Cluster of the Upper Austrian location agency Business Upper Austria are behind the project. The research project aims for multi-stage recycling concepts. Due to the lack of standardization in chemistry, design and decomposability, the project partners want to develop a wide range of possible processes. At each process stage, a diagnosis is made, the exposed components are dismantled and checked for economic and safety-critical aspects. Recycling should produce high-quality, unmixed raw materials with maximum reusability.

From the point of view of the consortium leader FILL from Gurten, the project is going very well. “Already in this early phase, in addition to domestic and European research institutions, many industrial partners from various areas of the battery value chain are asking to find out about details and results of the project and to specifically develop one or another topic in direct exchange,” says Josef Ecker, project manager at FILL. Gernot Schlögl from the Institute of Manufacturing Technology (IFT) at Graz University of Technology explains: “Above all, the requirements regarding the flexibility of the separation processes are currently being researched at the IFT in order to be able to derive system concepts from them.” However, the fundamental problem with battery recycling has not yet changed, emphasizes Ecker: "The previous analysis of selected battery systems unfortunately confirms our expectations. Batteries in their current form and form are neither designed nor prepared for repair, second life or other types of reuse." This makes it all the more important and encouraging that concepts and processes that are already being developed to repair, reuse or recycle the systems before they are recycled. “The BattBox consortium has already made great progress here, which we will translate into industrial-grade and value-preserving solutions over the course of the second year of research,” says Josef Ecker.