CMI researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory developed a robotic disassembly system for spent electric vehicle battery packs to safely and efficiently recycle and reuse critical materials while reducing toxic waste. Tim McIntyre, principal investigator in ORNL’s Electrification and Energy Infrastructures Division, led the CMI project "Li-ion Battery Disassembly, Remanufacturing, and Li&Co Recovery."
“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,” McIntyre said. Limiting human interaction is important for both safety and efficiency. The automated system can be easily reconfigured to any type of battery stack. It can be programmed to access just the individual battery modules for refurbishment or reuse as stationary energy storage, or the batteries can be taken apart down to the cell level for separation and materials recovery.
The work builds on expertise developed in previous ORNL projects for CMI that focused on robotic disassembly of hard drives for recovery of rare-earth magnets.
“Automatic disassembly of components containing critical materials not only eliminates labor-intensive manual disassembly, but provides for an efficient process to separate the components into higher value streams where the critical materials are concentrated into individual feedstocks for recycle processing,” said CMI Director Tom Lograsso. “This added value is an important part of establishing an economically viable process.”
See the full story and link to video about the process at Oak Ridge National Laboratory: Automated disassembly line aims to make battery recycling safer, faster