“This money came from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and each project is aimed at improving the economics of recycling EV batteries and their components,” Sykes's announcement stated.
The university, in a city that’s also the center of a sustainable polymer industry hub that’s also received more than $80 million in federal and state funding, is focused on ways to reclaim and recycle the plastics that go into, or more accurately around EV batteries, said a lead researcher, James Eagan.
“Electrification of vehicles is critical to achieving clean transportation, but this cannot come at the expense of generating a mountain of electronic waste. In our project, we’re developing robotic disassembly and sorting of the precious metals and the plastics in the battery packs,” said Eagan, an assistant professor at the university’s School of Polymer Science and Engineering. “We then take those separated materials and recycle them through scalable methods.”
Eagan said the university is collaborating with Schaeffler, a German-based company with operations in Wooster, Ohio, where it’s building a $230 million plant to produce products that include electric axles for light and medium-duty vehicles.
It’s also working with Altera, an Akron-based company that specializes in plastic recycling, he said.
The grant itself is significant, but Eagan said it goes hand in hand with another $2 million in funding provided by the university’s industry partners.
EV batteries are best known for the lithium and exotic metals they contain. But plastics make up a significant part of the batteries, especially by volume, because EV batteries have thick plastic shells to protect them from the impact of crashes or road hazards and also keep them thermally insulated.
Because of that volume, the batteries’ plastics would, if discarded, take up a lot of room in landfills, where allowing trash to take up as little volume as possible is often a priority.
“They’re really large and are really almost the entire vehicle,” Eagan said of EV batteries.
The university is working on ways to shred the casings of batteries in ways that will produce a waste stream that can be sorted as robotic arms pull the plastic out so it can be recycled.
But for it to work, the process will have to be efficient because the plastics typically have a lower resale value than other materials in the batteries.
“Plastics are tricky because plastics aren’t that valuable,” Eagan said.
The plastics used in EV batteries contain glass fibers that give them their strength and rigidity. The recycling process needs to shred the plastic enough that it can be sorted, but not so much that those fibers become too short to do their job – or so much that the material is left in pieces too small for robots to sort.
“Those bits of material, after being sorted by the robot, will move to an extruder and we’re developing a recycling method that preserves their strength and integrity,” Eagan said. “The devil is in the details.”
Then there’s the challenge of creating a method of identifying the pieces of plastic that the robots should pick up.
Eagan said the two ways he thinks that might be done is with infrared spectroscopy, which would give robotics “IR vision” that could see the parts it wants, or acoustic impedance that would bounce sound off the material and identify the targeted components by the way that sound is bounced back to the robots.
Another Akron company, Black Mass Recycling, works with methods to recycle the more valuable metals in the batteries — which might be key to making the economics of recycling batteries feasible, Eagan said.
Perfecting the methodology and process may take time, and Eagan and other researchers have already been working on the problem for several years.
But, since EVs are still relatively new in the U.S., aren’t on the roads in large numbers, and typically have batteries that last years, he thinks there’s time.
“It’s not mostly EVs on the road yet and not many are being decommissioned yet,” he said. “I think there’s enough runway to solve the problem before it exists."