TY - CONF

T1 - Recycling of Nd2Fe14B Magnets

AU - Stuhlpfarrer, Philipp

AU - Luidold, Stefan

AU - Antrekowitsch, Helmut

PY - 2015

Y1 - 2015

N2 - The use of rare earth magnets increases in the past twenty years, because of their high performancein combination with the extensive application area. Therefore the need of critical raw materials likelight and heavy rare earths is enhancing to achieve more performance. The supply risk of these elementsfrom primary producers turns into a dramatic situation because of the local concentrated productionsides and the insufficient availability. For that reason, recycling could be a chance to putpressure on the marked leader by generating a suitably product from a waste stream. The strategicposition of recovering metals instead of landfilling allows a decrease of solid waste managementand ensures the possibility to recover critical raw materials. The majority of the rare earths productionis used for high performance magnets. Such are appropriated in simple devices like hard discdrives for data storage. The problem of recovering these metals is the complex structure of differentmaterials surrounding and the missing pre-treatment step before separating them without discharginginto a wrong material fraction. The aim of this work is to point out a recycling concept for recoveringmagnets from hard disc drives in a preparation treatment for feeding them into a hydrometallurgicalprocess. This step is construed to recover rare earth elements with ideal prerequisitefor further processing with as less steps as possible and also to save chemical input materials to geta sustained success. In addition the process allows an environmental-oriented closed-loop circulationof the acid with integrated regeneration step to achieve maximum recycling rates. An advantageof the recirculation is based on the enrichment of boron under the investigated conditionswith subsequent possibility of recovering.

AB - The use of rare earth magnets increases in the past twenty years, because of their high performancein combination with the extensive application area. Therefore the need of critical raw materials likelight and heavy rare earths is enhancing to achieve more performance. The supply risk of these elementsfrom primary producers turns into a dramatic situation because of the local concentrated productionsides and the insufficient availability. For that reason, recycling could be a chance to putpressure on the marked leader by generating a suitably product from a waste stream. The strategicposition of recovering metals instead of landfilling allows a decrease of solid waste managementand ensures the possibility to recover critical raw materials. The majority of the rare earths productionis used for high performance magnets. Such are appropriated in simple devices like hard discdrives for data storage. The problem of recovering these metals is the complex structure of differentmaterials surrounding and the missing pre-treatment step before separating them without discharginginto a wrong material fraction. The aim of this work is to point out a recycling concept for recoveringmagnets from hard disc drives in a preparation treatment for feeding them into a hydrometallurgicalprocess. This step is construed to recover rare earth elements with ideal prerequisitefor further processing with as less steps as possible and also to save chemical input materials to geta sustained success. In addition the process allows an environmental-oriented closed-loop circulationof the acid with integrated regeneration step to achieve maximum recycling rates. An advantageof the recirculation is based on the enrichment of boron under the investigated conditionswith subsequent possibility of recovering.

KW - Magnets

KW - rare earths recycling

KW - sustainable

KW - environmental-oriented closed-loop circulation

KW - critical raw materials

M3 - Paper

SP - 925

EP - 938

T2 - European Metallurgical Conference 2015

Y2 - 14 June 2015 through 17 June 2015

ER -