The use of hydrogen to separate and recycle neodymium–iron–boron-type magnets from electronic waste

By A. Walton, Han Yi, N. Rowson, J. Speight, V. Mann, R. Sheridan, A. Bradshaw, I. R. Harris, A. Williams. 2015

192 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The rare earth metals have been identified by the European Union and the United States as being at greatest supply risk of all the materials for clean energy technologies. Of particular concern are neodymium and dysprosium, both of which are employed in neodymium–iron–boron based magnets. Recycling of magnets based on these materials and contained within obsolete electronic equipment, could provide an additional and secure supply. In the present work, hydrogen has been employed as a processing agent to decrepitate sintered neodymium–iron–boron based magnets contained within hard disk drives into a demagnetised, hydrogenated powder. This powder was then extracted mechanically from the devices with an extraction efficiency of 90 ± 5% and processed further using a combination of sieves and ball bearings, to produce a powder containing 90% of the magnetic properties of the starting material with significantly less energy than that employed in primary magnet production. The particular route used will depend upon the magnetic properties required, the level of contamination of the extracted material and the compositional variation of the feedstock. The various possibilities have been summarised in a flow diagram.

Subfields: Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, Mechanical Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/84e52dd016779ab7e647afc7f789e40d5c4a7bf8

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

1. T. van Gerven
2. P. Jones
3. K. Binnemans

In Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

1. K. Binnemans
2. P. Jones

In Mechanical Engineering

1. K. Binnemans
2. T. van Gerven
3. P. Jones
4. Oliver Gutfleisch
5. M. Buchert
6. B. Steenari
7. Bart Blanpain

Citations in the corpus

• REE Recovery from End-of-Life NdFeB Permanent Magnet Scrap: A Critical Review (2017, methodology): “The University of Birmingham (UK) has developed a hydrogen-processing method to extract sintered NdFeB magnets from computer hard disk drives [13, 41].”