“RaRE established an end to end supply chain for recyclable rare-earth ancillary motors. Building on work completed at the University of Birmingham to devise a method to extract magnets from waste electronics supplied by Intelligent Lifecycle Solutions. The material was re-processed back into new magnetic materials at pilot scale by HyProMag to demonstrate the quality of material which can be produced in terms of its magnetic behaviour, mechanical performance and corrosion resistance which are key to the end user application.

The recycled magnets were built into an ancillary electric motor designed by Advanced Electric Machines Research to a Bentley Motors specification and focused on reducing the overall complexity of electrical systems in electric vehicles and designed with recycling in mind. This was the first time that such a recyclable motor was demonstrated. Unipart took this motor design and used it as the core focus for the design of a flexible volume motor assembly line suitable for production volumes of 100,000 units p.a.

The total budget for RaRE was £2.6 million, of which the Office for Low Emission Vehicles (OLEV) via Innovate UK funded £1.9 million with project partners funding the £0.7 million balance. HyProMag’s contribution was fully funded from the £300,000 investment made by Maginito in January 2020.”

RaRE came to a successful conclusion in April 2023 with demonstration magnets being manufactured for two motors. During the project HyProMag made excellent progress into process enhancement, pushing coercivity requirements and remanence requirements further than previously achieved using short loop recycling techniques.