Interview with our partner CARTIF

Interview with our partner CARTIF

As part of our series of interviews with Free4Lib’s partners, Juan Castro from CARTIF tells us more about his role as a coordinator of the Free4Lib project.

‍

What role does Cartif play in Free4Lib? What does it mean to be coordinator of the Free4Lib project?

‍
CARTIF focuses on the management of the project but also on research, with 4 technologies developed in the project inpre-treatment and material recovery. On the other hand, CARTIF also carries out the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of the project and takes part in Techno-economic, Hazard and Operability Studies. As coordinator of FREE4LIB, personally, I can say that it is a privilege to lead a large and great consortium like that, with organisations from 7 different countries. Moreover, this role gives us the opportunity to work on battery recycling and research new technologies that will allow us to find new opportunities to continue researching inside the battery value chain in the next years.
‍

On what technical aspects of the project is CARTIF also working?

‍

As mentioned before, CARTIF is carrying out 4 technologies regarding recycling: 2 of them focus on the pre-treatment stage, like manual delamination and ultrasonic delamination; and 2 more relate to materials recovery under direct recycling process, like hydrothermal, and electrochemicalre-lithiations focuses on the electrodes from Lithium-Ion batteries.

‍

What can you expect to be the main challenges which the project will have to face in the future?

‍
The main challenge will appear in the scale-up step, when results from the laboratory will allow us to determine which technologies will be feasible to be scaled. Another challenge will be related to the Battery Passports which, in our opinion, will be the key point to produce a genuine change in the battery value chain, where tracking traceability allows all the value chain actors to reduce costs, risks and times of handling end-of-life batteries.
‍

FREE4LIB is part of the clusterhub. What is it all about? What kind of synergies are you trying to drive?

‍
Materials for the batteries cluster HUB is composed of 12 projects with more than 150 organisations that allow us to find collaborations to spread our project between the community. We would also like to take this opportunity to spread the Open Access FREE4LIB Battery Passport Platform. Which will allow us to grow with the collaborations of different stakeholders feed, to facilitate the battery value chain transition to a circular economy in the coming years, meeting the European Battery Regulation pending to be approved.

‍

A few words about CARTIF:

CARTIF is a horizontal, private and non-profit Research Institution, whose main mission is providing innovative solutions to the industry to enhance their processes, systems and products, improving their competitiveness and creating new business opportunities. CARTIF develops R&D projects financed by private companies or through public funds obtained from competitive calls at national and international level. CARTIF also supports public entities (city councils, regional governments…) on high impact projects planning and development. As a multidisciplinary centre, CARTIF works in multiple knowledge fields focused on many economic sectors: energy, food, industry, construction and infrastructures, health and environment, addressing research lines oriented to the main societal challenges, as industry 4.0, smart grids, smart cities, energy efficiency, cultural heritage, quality of life, circular economy, natural resources and biotechnology.

In addition, CARTIF has an analytical testing laboratory that offers analysis services to the centre and to other companies by means of a wide offer that includes 3D digitalization, biomass characterization, food biotechnology and material nanotechnology.

‍