SUSMAGPRO

Background

Rare Earth Elements (REE) are listed by EU as Critical Raw Materials (CRM) due to the elements high importance for the green energy transition, combined with a high supply risk. Permanent magnets based on REE are essential components of many high-tech products such as electric cars, water pump motors, loudspeakers, and wind turbines.

Despite their name, REE are not rare to find in nature, however, they are difficult to extract and mining causes significant environmental damage. Currently, only a fraction of EU demand is also met by EU production, while China is the main producer and exporter worldwide. In addition to mining, further steps of the production process are carried out there, including oxidation and refinement. Given these circumstances, it is questionable if the current REE supply chain can be considered crisis-proof and sustainable.

Project goals

The EU project SUSMAGPRO makes an important contribution to securing a sustainable supply of raw materials for the production of Rare Earth NdFeB magnets by developing a recycling supply chain and demonstrating the effective reuse of recycled materials within several industries. Within the project, a consortium of 18 European partners from academia and industry, coordinated by Pforzheim University, is working on developing a recycling supply chain for Rare Earth magnets.

The project will considerably scale up the volumes of recovered Neodymium (Nd) from NdFeB magnets. A bottleneck in the recycling flow is to get access to enough material. The Rare Earth containing magnets are dispersed in a large mix of different waste materials. Magnet localization and extraction must be done in an efficient way to keep the cost of the recycled material below or at least not significantly higher than the cost of virgin material.

RISE role

RISE role in the project is to develop and build efficient sensor systems to identify, localize and concentrate Rare Earth NdFeB magnets from waste material. The RISE team has many years of experience in sensor principles, using hardware and software design to build complete measurement systems and to use data analysis to combine information from multiple sources. 

To detect and identify magnetic material entailing rare earths in different applications, such as computer hard disk drives, electric motors and loudspeakers, RISE are developing a range of sensor systems and a magnetic scanner. The scanner will be integrated it into an automated separation system including further steps such as a robotic sorting and cutting line. The system will be scaled into a fully equipped pilot sorting line for processing hard disk drives. The system will be built into a container, making it easy to transport to further premises dealing with electrical and electronic waste.