n TECHNOLOGY February 2024 www.drivesncontrols.com 14 A CONSORTIUM OF German organisations, led by Schae er, is developing techniques that will allow electric motor components to be re-used at the end of the motor’s life, rather than being shredded and recycled. Members of the Reassert project – which is being funded by the EU and the German government – are pursuing various concepts for repairing, remanufacturing and re-using electric motors. The project also aims to develop a prototype electric motor suitable for the circular economy. Electric motors contain valuable raw materials such as copper and electrical steel, as well as rareearths, which cannot be recovered using current recycling methods. Hence, extending the use of the motors is becoming increasingly important. Another factor that applies, in particular, to electric vehicle motors is that their raw materials have larger carbon footprints than those used in combustion engines. At present, materials such as copper and aluminium can be recovered from old motors using manual or automated recycling methods. Traction motors, in particular, can be disassembled, shredded, sorted into individual materials which are then melted down for recycling. However, the recycled materials, which are often contaminated, cannot usually be used in new motors, and the individual components and assemblies are destroyed in the recycling process. According to circular economy principles, raw material recycling should only be chosen as a last resort and replaced instead by strategies that preserve value, such as re-use, repair and remanufacturing. “We want to establish a closed-loop system in which valuable resources are re-used to eliminate dependency on raw material imports and to minimise raw material extraction,” explains Julian Große Erdmann, a scientist at the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation IPA, which is a member of the Reassert consortium. “With these strategies, fewer raw materials like rare-earths, copper and others are needed, perhaps only for spare parts,” he adds. For raw material recycling, the project partners want to be able to disassemble motors and sort the materials before shredding. They are using EV motors to analyse and select which strategies to use. The project’s participants aim to build a process chain from inbound inspection to end-of-line testing. Each step of the process will have its own demonstrator and test rig – from initial inspection, disassembly, demagnetisation, cleaning, component diagnosis and remanufacturing, through to reassembly and end-of-line testing, where the motor’s functions will be assessed. One of the challenges will be disassembling and re-using magnetic materials.“A rotor with permanent magnets is dicult to disassemble into its components, even in a manual disassembly process, due to the coating and bonding of the magnets,”Große Erdmann points out. “Here, the goal is to establish nondestructive disassembly methods.” An AI tool being developed as part of the project will help to choose the best value-retention strategy for an application. It will have access to the motor’s product and process data, saved as a digital twin. The knowledge gathered during the project is intended to be used to design new motors. The goal is to develop a prototype motor that can be disassembled easily and to which value-preservation strategies can be applied. As well as Schae er and Fraunhofer, the Reassert project members include the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Bright Testing, iFakt and Riebesam. THE ENGINEERING PLASTICS specialist igus has developed a humanoid hand gripper that allows its ReBeL family of low-cost collaborative robots (cobots) to take on human-like tasks. The hand, made of lubrication-free plastics, has been designed to imitate human hand movements, and costs from £2,668. “With the new low-cost hand, the ReBeL can perform a wide range of simple humanoid tasks and applications, especially in r&d at universities, but also tasks in commercial kitchens or in the entertainment industry,” explains Adam Sanjurgo, igus UK’s manager of low-cost automation. “Since the ReBeL is light and aordable, with a weight of around 8kg and starting from £4,200, it is widely used in applications that humans would normally do,” he adds. “For this reason, we received several customer enquiries for a robotic hand that can be connected easily to the ReBeL via plug-and-play.” The hand is controlled via digital IO at the tool centre point, simplifying integration and adding ¢exibility. Its low price is achieved, in part, by using lubrication-free plastics, including plain bearings in the joints made of iglidur polymers which allow smooth, precise movements of individual £ngers. The hand can be controlled by various interfaces, including USB, TTL (5V) serial and internal scripting. All components, including ¢ange mounts, cables and the control system, are delivered directly from igus. The compact, lightweight ReBeL cobots can be used to sort, pick and move items with the help of cameras and mechanical or vacuum gripping systems. They allow SMEs to enter robotics at a relatively low cost. www.igus.co.uk Low-cost bionic hand gives cobots human-like capabilities Project aims to give a second life to motor components The Reassert project is aiming to develop an electric motor suitable for the circular economy
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