News

Automated sorting and dismantling of LIBs

10/10/2024

Researchers at University of Agder (UiA) are working on the automated sorting and dismantling of lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) that facilitates their reuse for second life applications.

During the first reporting period, UiA designed a simulator within a virtual environment, which allowed researchers to collect necessary data and parameters, and additionally identify potential bottlenecks that may occur in the actual disassembly process. Beyond collecting data without any physical experiment, the simulation environment brings the benefit of being cost- and time-efficient, allowing for safe and flexible robotic programming without disrupting the production.

According to the simulation environment that covers the entire disassembly process, from automated discharging to sorting, the entire process can run with a total duration spanning between 12 and 14 minutes. The detailed results of this activity will soon be publicly available in a new scientific paper titled addressing the evaluation of deep reinforcement learning for job shop problems.

During the past six months, UiA researchers have constructed a virtual simulator to train the Machine Learning (ML) algorithms. Deep learning methods have already been applied for the Job Shop problem for finding the optimal disassembly sequence when the dependence matrix is known. Next development steps will entail training the algorithms to enable automatic disassembly of Electric Vehicle (EV) batteries without prior knowledge, while optimising procedures and enhancing safety.