Automotive Engineering - May 2024 - 23

COVER STORY
ReCell's Jeffery Spangenberger.
says that direct recycling is a huge opportunity to really
catapult the industry into a cost-effective, profitable
endeavor, and that would be over hydro and pyro. "
Spangenberger said ReCell has around 50 projects
it's working on, with about half of them focused on
direct recycling.
" When we started this, there was one company that
was working on direct recycling and as we break down
the barriers, we want industry to take off, " he said.
" Now, there's about three companies that are working
on this up to the pilot scale. That's showing that we're
getting people interested and funding is flowing into
direct recycling. "
ReCell's other projects focus on advanced resource
recovery (finding another home for components, perhaps
being upcycled into a new product), design for
sustainability (designing batteries so they're easier to
recycle or demanufacture) and modeling and analysis
(like EverBatt), which Spangenberger said allows
ReCell to focus on projects that make big-picture
sense. These four aspects obviously interact with
each other. Designing something for sustainability
means considering if a chemical added to a battery
for better performance could obviate its recycling
capability, for example.
" You can't have [design for sustainability] as the
first metric in the design of a product, " Spangenberger
said. " If you can't sell a product, you don't need to
worry about recycling. So, the cost has to be right,
performance has to be right. But I think that one of
the metrics that has to be included is end-of-life management.
And that's true for any product. "
AUTOMOTIVE ENGINEERING
Direct recycling recovers active materials that can go directly back into
manufacture of new batteries, avoiding expensive and energy-intensive
processing steps.
Hexagon's digital twins to the rescue
Global digital reality solutions company Hexagon uses digital twins
to help companies manufacture their products better. Hexagon's director
of automotive, George Cuff, told SAE Media that digital twin
technology can be used with EV batteries to analyze how they function
in the real world, like their various thermal characteristics.
" That information can be captured and we can drive that back into
product development, " he said. " We've got a variety of different tools
in the simulation space. As they're trying to optimize the design, they
run through a variety of different scenarios, using that real-world information
to help drive that. "
Cuff said digital twins could also be used to better recycle batteries.
Hexagon's software can manage various materials in the digital
twin for simulation analysis, for example.
" [That data] can also provide the ability to analyze and say, for this
particular battery or this particular vehicle, we have X amount of these
raw materials, " he said. " This can be recycled, this percentage is hazardous
material waste. I can absolutely see a scenario where governments
are going to regulate or require an understanding of the types
of materials, what can be recycled in these battery packs, what can't
be, and what would ultimately be hazardous materials. When these
batteries and battery packs really come to end of life there, we're going
to need to have a good solid plan to be able to handle them. "
May 2024 23
BOTH IMAGES: RECELL
Automotive Engineering - May 2024

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