The Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Momentum Technologies signed a non-exclusive licensing agreement for an ORNL process designed to recover rare earth magnets from used computer hard drives. The process was developed as part of the DOE's Critical Materials Institute, an Energy Innovation Hub led by Ames Laboratory.
Timothy McIntyre leads the CMI project at ORNL and is a program manager in ORNL’s Electrical and Electronics Systems Research Division. The process economically recovers large amounts of magnets made using neodymium—a rare earth element that is mined outside the United States. The permanent magnets are the most powerful on earth, and used in everything from computer hard drives and cell phones to clean energy technologies such as electric vehicles and wind turbines.
The process recovers the magnets, brackets, circuit boards, aluminum, and steel, while automatically destroying data storage media to ensure security. The magnets may then be directly reused by hard drive manufacturers or in motor assemblies, used in other applications through resizing or reshaping, or processed back to rare earth metal. The recycling method can be adapted to target other consumer goods containing rare earth magnets, such as used electric motors, appliances, and heating and air conditioning systems.
Dallas-based Momentum Technologies is focused on extraction of rare earth elements and other materials from hard drives for recycling and direct reuse.
Link to the full story: ORNL licenses rare earth magnet recycling process to Momentum Technologies