With more fleet and service trucks making the move to electric, an environmental conundrum exists—what to do with all of those eventual dead batteries?
Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) have developed a robotic disassembly system for spent electric vehicle battery packs that will safely and efficiently recycle and reuse critical materials while reducing toxic waste.
At this juncture in the technology of electric vehicle batteries, very few are being recycled—an opportunity exists to reduce waste.
Currently (no pun intended), recycling is done by hand—discharging the battery and physically taking it apart, which is not only time expensive, but it exposes workers to toxic chemicals and potentially high levels of electric discharge.
ORNL’s robotic system can safely perform the recycling duties and do it nearly 10x quicker—disassembling 100 or more battery stacks in the same amount of time human worker can do 12.
Using a robotic system originally designed to extract rare-earth magnets from old computer hard drives, it was reconfigured for spent electric vehicle batteries, with its new disassembly system able to work with any type of battery stack, safely undoing bolts and the housing even if the device has a charge within it.
“With our system, when the robot picks up the battery pack and puts it on the production line, it marks the last time a human will touch it until it’s in pieces and parts,” said Tim McIntyre, ORNL team leader.
The robotic system can then disassemble the battery down to its cell level, extracting different materials for recovery, like lithium, cobalt, lithium and metal foils.
Robotic System
It can also remove individual battery modules to be refurbished and reused or upcycled in energy storage systems.
Said Jonathan Harter, team member, “If the electric vehicle market accelerates as expected in the next 10 to 20 years, we will need to address the waste stream issue and view these spent vehicles and batteries as central to the supply chain for manufacturing materials.”
With a plan to expand the system to assuage the commercial quantity of spent electric vehicle batteries, the scientists acknowledged that their system could also be refined to disassemble electric vehicle drivetrains, that also contain high value materials.