Low Cost, High Throughput Rare Earth Recovery System for End of Life Scrap

The goal of this phase I project is to develop and demonstrate a low cost, high throughput sorting system to recover rare earth materials from end-of-life products for extracting the rare earth elements (REEs) based on UHV’s x-ray fluorescence (XRF) and artificial intelligence sensor fusion technologies developed for automotive scrap metal sorting under funding from DOE-ARPA-E. The efficient recovery and recycling of rare earth elements will result in reduction of need of mining, which is an uneconomical, hazardous and environmentally unfriendly process, also reduces dependency on other countries for imports. Theproposed sorting technology uses sensor fusion of cameras and XRF to determine the composition of individual scrap pieces. The Phase I work plan includes: Procurement of scrap from various end of life components such as hard drives, cell phones and MRI instruments. Separation of REE and metallic pieces from the non-metallic pieces. Sorting of REE pieces from non-REE pieces. Development of XRF and A.I algorithms for high speed sorting of REE pieces. The advantages of the proposed technology include recovery of required material in its original form, high throughput as compared to manual sorting, no specific atmospheric requirements, easy installation.