The rapid growth of the Electric Vehicle market has driven demand for lithium-ion batteries higher. The expected shortage of raw materials together with the big number of battery packs that will reach their end of lives in the next years has created an immediate demand for an efficient recycling process. To develop an efficient and safe recycling process, an automatic disassembly and recycling process is needed and currently under development.

In this study, current lithium-ion batteries recycling techniques and robotic disassembly techniques were investigated. The purpose of the study was to contribute to the development of a safer and more effective recycling process. The work was focused on contributing to the first part of the recycling process, where opening and disassembly of the lithium-ion batteries takes place. The aim of this work was to find a robotic solution for disassembly of cooling pipes and cables.

The study included a detailed investigation of one specific battery pack from NEVS. During the work, it became clear that the design of the battery pack and the disassembly plan was not suitable for robotic disassembly. Therefore, a revised disassembly plan, that is better suited for robotic disassembly, was developed.

The study resulted in a concept design for the robot cell and the robot tool for the disassembly task. The investigation of the disassembly task showed that a scissor-like tool that could cut off the pipes and cables was most suitable. The proposed tool design was of multi head type, with a cutter and a gripper mounted orthogonal to each other. Both collaborative and conventional industrial robots were investigated for the task. But to fulfil safety requirements an industrial robot was chosen and built into a fenced robot cell.

The robot cell and the tool were modelled in a computer simulation software and the disassembly task was simulated to verify the concept. The simulation showed that the proposed design was suitable for the task. However, some pipes were difficult to reach with the tool in the simulation and they will likely be difficult to reach in a real scenario as well. The proposed design can be used for building a first prototype and try the concept. But further development or changes to the battery design will be needed before the battery pack can be disassembled in a fully automatic way. The need of a standardized design for lithium-ion batteries was discussed in the literature review and it became clear during the work that the battery design caused issues also in this case. Suggestions for how the design of the NEVS battery pack could be changed to be more suitable for robotic disassembly was also concluded in the study.