European Training Network for the Design and Recycling of Rare-Earth Permanent Magnet Motors and Generators in Hybrid and Full Electric Vehicles (DEMETER)

On 12-11-2018, NEMO, CROCODILE and DEMETER were presented at the 2nd annual Critical Raw Materials (CRMs) event, which was co-organised by the European Commission and the H2020 project SCRREEN during the Raw Materials Week.

Following their milestone achievements on rare earth (RE) high-performance magnets, Prof. Gutfleisch et al. (TU Darmstadt) published a landmark paper on the vision and reality of heavy RE-free, free RE and RE-free magnets.

The extraction of lanthanides from nitrate media with basic nitrate extractants shows a remarkable decreasing trend when going from left to right in the lanthanide series. The Binnemans SOLVOMET group is taking the first step.

Within the EU Remaghic project, new REEs and Mg recovery processes have been developed from a selection of waste streams in order to produce new low cost competitive alloys for the automotive, biomedical and aeronautic industry.

ETN DEMETER (Design and Recycling of Rare-Earth Permanent Magnet Motors and Generators in Hybrid and Full Electric Vehicles) organises the DEMETER Closing Symposium in Feb’ 2019 (together with SIM² KU Leuven, GloREIA and Valeo).

Following the success of the Raw Materials Week 2017, the 3rd edition of the EU "Raw Materials Week", organised by the European Commission, will take place from Monday 12 to Friday 16 November 2018 in Brussels.

Gwendolyn Bailey, Early Stage Researcher (ESR) at KU Leuven in the EU MSCA-ETN DEMETER project, consistently endeavours to communicate science to a broad audience. She has now won the 2018 MSCA award for science dissemination.

In their “Fifty Shades of Grey” project, Stelios Spathariotis and Prof. Andy Abbott (both University of Leicester) used Deep Eutectic Solvents to create a Union Jack art piece made by fifty different spots of metal colour…

Prof. Koen Binnemans was given the LeCoq de Boisbaudran award for his “outstanding and long-lasting contribution” in the field of rare earth recycling. The prize was awarded at ICfE-10 (Sep’ 3–6, 2018) in Lausanne, Switzerland.

In a new DEMETER Policy Brief, Gwendolyn Bailey and Karel Van Acker (KU Leuven) motivate why the time has come for the electric-vehicle industry (EV industry) to start working together with the producers of rare earths (REEs).