New Project Aims to Develop Sustainable E-Motors
RWTH Aachen University has launched a three-year R&D project to develop sustainable components for electric vehicle traction motors. Photo courtesy Sonplas GmbH
AACHEN, Germany—Engineers at RWTH Aachen University have launched a three-year R&D project to develop sustainable components for electric vehicle traction motors. The goal of the Kreisläufer initiative is to produce new types of rotors that can be easily recycled.
“[Traditional] product topologies and production processes in the field of electric motors are not designed for circular economy and recycling suitability,” says Achim Kampker, Ph.D., a mechanical engineering professor who specializes in e-mobility components. “As a result, critical materials such as copper and rare-earth elements, are lost in current recycling processes.
“With the help of production and disassembly lines, the recyclable rotors [will] be assembled and then dismantled so that the individual components can then be fed into a suitable recycling routine,” explains Kampker. “At the same time, concepts for recording relevant data in the production and recycling process [will] be developed and demonstrated.
“The data sets collected will also serve as the basis for the development of a digital product passport using the rotor assembly as an example,” Kampker points out. “[It] will be used to provide information directly for automated dismantling and recycling. In the future, this could enable flexible, large-scale disassembly of rotors.”
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