Rare earth metals have been identified by the EU and US as being at greatest supply risk of all materials for clean energy technologies. Neodymium and dysprosium, which are both employed in NdFeB magnets, have been highlighted in particular. Recycling of scrap NdFeB magnets contained within waste electronics could provide a secure supply of these materials. In this work hydrogen has been used as a processing gas to break down sintered NdFeB magnets contained within hard disk drives into a demagnetised hydrided NdFeB powder. The powder is then extracted mechanically from the electronics and is further processed to produce a powder with <330ppm of Ni contamination. The extracted hydrided powder can be reprocessed in a number of ways, either directly from the alloy by re-sintering or HDDR processing, or by extraction of the rare earth elements from the alloy. The advantages and disadvantages of these processes are discussed in the latter part of this paper.
展开▼
