The second annual conference of the Innosuisse flagship project CircuBAT took place in November 2023. The entire project team – consisting of 11 research and 24 implementation partners – came together at Empa in Dübendorf to exchange ideas and present the progress of the individual work packages. The project can look back on a successful second year; for example, a process for the recovery of copper foil from the anode was developed in the laboratory and the mixing process for the dry coating of electrodes was scaled up to a throughput suitable for production. The latter has met with a favourable response from the industry. Furthermore, a newly developed, highly efficient 50 kW DC/DC converter can be used to integrate aged LV and HV batteries into a second-life battery storage system. The prototype is now ready to be further developed into a marketable product. The basic research work enables a better assessment of aged batteries in storage systems and the set-up of a virtual training environment for robots provides a basis for the automated demanufacturing of batteries in the reuse and recycling process. The results from the various sub-projects and workshops are continuously being integrated into the life cycle analysis for batteries and the Swiss circular economy model for lithium-ion batteries from electromobility.
Keynote on the Battery Pass project
Another highlight of the event was the presentation by Stephanie Schenk and Patrick Gering on the Battery Pass project. The European Union’s new Battery Regulation, which formulates requirements for all aspects of a battery’s life cycle for the first time worldwide, will require a digital product passport for batteries from February 2027. The consortium project funded by the German government aims to analyse the requirements of the new battery regulation and implement them in a prototype of a digital battery passport. The battery passport supports seamless documentation of the battery life cycle from production to use and recycling. The aim is to enable the sustainable and circular management of traction batteries.
In CircuBAT, further workshops on the topics of regulation and standardisation as well as consumer preferences will follow in the third year of the project in order to further develop the circular economy model for lithium-ion batteries.
