GreenBattery - DIGISORT

On the way to a "green battery", a high recycling rate of recyclable materials is indispensable. This can be achieved through improved separation processes in the recycling stream. In the DIGISORT project, research is therefore being conducted into the digitization of mechanical separation processes in recycling using the example of wind sifting of shredded lithium-ion batteries. Wind sifting refers to a mechanical separation process in which particles are separated in a gas stream according to the laws of gravity and centrifugal force. The HIF contributes its expertise in characterizing material streams in the recycling process. In detail, the HIF will record on-line characteristic parameters of the recycling stream such as particle size, particle shape, material particle properties for input and product stream. For this purpose, crushed and non-crushed components of batteries will be detected and analyzed on a conveyor belt by a multi-sensor system (see figure). The development of these methods for a particle stream and the consolidation of the method-specific collected data in real time is a novel approach to digitalize the recycling chain. It also increases the sustainability of mechanical recycling processes. The development of the combined measurement technology with particle-discrete resolution aimed at here is an exemplary combination of application questioning and basic research, from which promising innovations can emerge. The measurement and control technology developed in DIGISORT can be used in the future along the entire recycling chain for quality monitoring and data acquisition. Moreover, the application is not limited to recycling processes of lithium-ion batteries, but can be adapted to a variety of other use cases.