BatDemBo

A New Approach to Battery Recycling: High Precision for Sustainable E-Mobility

Electric mobility is the key to a climate-friendly future. By 2030, Germany is expected to have up to 15 million electric vehicles. But what happens to the millions of batteries once they have reached the end of their useful life after many years of use? Today, we face a major challenge: batteries from electric cars have an extremely complex structure and consist of thousands of individual cells that are firmly welded together. Until now, it has been laborious, time-consuming, and expensive to break these connections by hand or using conventional methods.

The “BatDemBo” project is of central importance due to the rapid development of electric mobility and the associated raw material issues. The goal is to facilitate the transition from a linear throwaway mentality to an efficient and safe circular economy for lithium-ion batteries (LIB).

New Approaches to tackle high costs and dependence on raw materials

1. Enormous Increase in Waste Batteries in the Coming Years: Since the lifespan of electric vehicle batteries is limited, there is a rapidly growing volume of end-of-life traction batteries, for which efficient, automated industrial mass-scale dismantling processes are currently lacking.

2. Dependence on raw materials and legal requirements

Securing resources: Valuable materials such as lithium, cobalt, nickel, and copper must currently be imported largely from non-EU countries. Efficient recycling ensures Europe’s technological sovereignty.
EU Regulation: EU Regulation 2023/1542 already mandates high collection rates and recycling efficiencies today, and will also require minimum proportions of recycled materials in new batteries in the future. Without automated processes, these targets are virtually impossible to achieve economically.

3. The “bottleneck”: Complex disassembly: The biggest technical challenge is the enormous design diversity and complexity of today’s battery systems.

Connection technology as an obstacle: Battery cells are often permanently connected to cell connectors via thousands of weld points (up to 14,000 per battery).
Inefficiency of manual labor: To date, disassembly has been performed primarily by hand or using inflexible robot-assisted processes, which is extremely time-consuming and expensive.
Safety risks: Manual processes or thermal methods (such as lasers) pose risks of fire or damage to the cells.

The project objectives

Non-destructive single-cell evaluation

Until now, making a cell-specific decision (reuse vs. material recycling) has been virtually impossible. Often, only entire modules could be reused, as separating them into individual cells was too labor-intensive or unreliable. The project aims to develop a solution for non-destructively and automatically disconnecting cells. Only in this way can a decision be made for each individual cell as to whether it is transferred to a stationary storage system (second life) or directly recycled.

Economic Viability of E-Mobility

By reducing recycling costs and recovering expensive raw materials, the project contributes to improving the environmental footprint and economic attractiveness of electric mobility for end consumers.

Automated decoupling as the key to a sustainable battery cycle

Using special high-performance drilling machines, the weld points between the battery cells and their connectors are automatically drilled out with micrometer precision. Since the cells remain intact, a decision can be made on-site: Is the cell still good enough for a second use (e.g., as a stationary energy storage system)? Or does it go directly into high-quality material recycling?

Behind this technological leap is a skilled consortium comprising industry partners and the Fraunhofer Society. The Fraunhofer IWKS brings its many years of expertise in the field of “resource use instead of consumption.” In the project, the team from Hanau is taking on key tasks:

Process design: Fraunhofer IWKS is developing concepts for how automated drilling technology can be optimally integrated into existing recycling and dismantling processes.
Market analysis & sustainability: The experts are examining the market potential and evaluating the environmental benefits. For example, they calculate the CO₂ savings potential resulting from this efficient recovery of raw materials such as lithium, cobalt, and nickel.
Practical testing: Fraunhofer IWKS supports the development and testing of demonstration modules to ensure that the theory also functions smoothly in industrial practice.

A Look into the Future

The “BatDemBo” project makes a significant contribution to ensuring that Europe remains technologically independent in the recovery of critical raw materials. It not only makes e-mobility more environmentally sustainable, but also more cost-effective for end consumers in the long term thanks to lower recycling costs.

With the successful implementation of this process, we are laying the foundation for a new generation of recycling facilities together with our project partners. Companies that adopt such automated and high-precision solutions early on not only secure a decisive competitive edge in a rapidly growing market but are also already meeting the strict recycling quotas of the future. BatDemBo demonstrates: Investing in intelligent disassembly today is investing in tomorrow’s economic viability.