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Project

Sustainable Demanufacturing for a circular economy in an industry 4.0 (SUDE 4.0)

The proportion of automotive and electronic waste with components containing hazardous and precious metals will significantly increase in the coming years. Therefore, there is an outspoken opportunity for radical innovations adopting a distinctly different approach to support the transition to a more circular economy. For this purpose, an innovative automated dismantling process adopting deep learning computer vision has been developed. Lab scale tests, cost-benefit analysis and market analysis demonstrated a potential market size for Europe of more than 2500 such systems, but also that there is a need for increasing the autonomy and the versatility of the developed systems to handle the broad variety of end-of-life products. A first system with the by the promotors developed technology will be piloted by the end of 2020 for the end-of-life treatment of laptops. However, further developments are essential for this pilot and other envisaged applications for the integration of (self-)learning principles using “big data”, which will greatly benefit the autonomy and, hence, the value of the invention.
Date:1 Oct 2020 →  30 Sep 2022
Keywords:Automated dismantling, Reuse, Recycling,
Disciplines:Demanufacturing