Circular economy for flexible materials

While the automated handling of rigid objects is already well advanced in industry, soft and deformable materials are difficult to process with conventional robots due to their flexible structure. FlexCycle' (Flexible Robotic Automation Techniques for Soft Materials Recycling) is therefore developing autonomous systems that are able to identify, handle and dismantle flexible structures.

The robot tools and AI systems developed solve the following specific challenges for three areas of application:

• Fuel cells: The sensitive membranes in fuel cells are flexible and contain harmful substances, making manual handling an increased health risk. The robots enable these membranes to be extracted safely. A particular focus here is on the recovery of catalyst materials containing precious metals and the safe recycling of materials containing PFAS.
• Textiles: The flexible and unpredictable structure of garments makes automated processing difficult. AI systems are trained to recognize specific features such as seams in order to precisely remove accessories such as buttons and zippers and thus recover the fabrics for reuse.
• Cables: Cables often appear as tangled bundles during disposal, which makes targeted sorting and processing much more difficult. The robots must learn to navigate through the tangled wires, insulate a target cable and then automatically remove the layers of insulation in order to efficiently recover valuable metals such as copper.

The contribution of the Fraunhofer Institutes

Within the consortium, the Fraunhofer Research Institution for Materials Recycling and Resource Strategies IWKS and the Fraunhofer Institute for Structural Durability and System Reliability LBF play key roles in the recycling of technical membranes:

• The Fraunhofer IWKS focuses on the use case of PEM (Proton Exchange Membrane) fuel cells. Here, the institute's expertise is used to recover precious metal-containing catalyst materials (such as platinum) in a highly efficient manner. The aim is to keep valuable resources in the cycle and increase the economic efficiency of fuel cell technology.
• Fraunhofer LBF is dedicated to the technologically sophisticated recycling of fluorine-containing membranes (PFAS) such as Nafion, a perfluorinated ionomer. By researching processes such as chemical dissolution in special solvent systems with subsequent 'recasting' or depolymerization, these critical substances are sustainably recycled in order to address ecological risks and regulatory requirements.

Technological basis and outlook

The technological approach of FlexCycle is based on the combination of flexible robot tools (end effectors) and AI-based modeling. Adaptive hardware and software components should enable the methods developed to be quickly transferred to different industrial sectors. Over the course of the four-year project, demonstrators will be developed for all three use cases to prove the practical suitability of the solutions.

The project is coordinated by the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT) and funded by the 'Horizon Europe' program. In addition to the Fraunhofer Institutes and the IIT, the consortium includes the Jožef Stefan Institute, Georg August University of Göttingen, Technical University of Munich, Vytautas Magnus University, qb robotics Srl, Electrocycling GmbH, Symbio SAS, OSIT Impresa S.p.A.