The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has selected 14 projects for award negotiations totaling up to $17 million that are intended to accelerate critical materials innovation while promoting safe, sustainable, economic and efficient solutions to meet current and future supply chain needs. The investments include projects to examine the recovery of critical materials from scrap and postconsumer products.
One of these projects, in the "use magnets with reduced critical materials content" area, will be led by Ames National Laboratory and prototype and scale up magnet technology developed by the Critical Materials Innovation Hub:
Ames National Laboratory, Ames, Iowa, could receive $1 million to prototype and scale up the NdFeB magnet technology developed at the Critical Materials Innovation Hub (CMI Hub). The technology aims to improve manufacturing efficiency by enhancing the magnet’s mechanical toughness, which reduces the failure rate when machining the blocks into parts. Improving the magnet’s strength, reducing waste and machining failure rate, increasing the magnet’s service life and making it easier to recycle the magnets would lead to savings in the critical materials required to make the traditional NdFeB sintered magnets.
Link to the full story: DOE to invest $17M in critical minerals supply chain