Projects

Summary

Hard metals, or cemented carbides, are essential for strategic sectors such as the automotive, aeronautics, defence, construction, mining and the food industry, owing to their unique combination of hardness and tenacity. However, producing them depends on critical raw materials such as tungsten (W) and cobalt (Co), the supply of which is subject to limitations and price volatility.

RESQTOOL deals with these challenges by providing a comprehensive solution for optimising the recovery of hard metals while preserving their original properties, thus facilitating their reuse in industrial applications without any loss in terms of performance. The project seeks to overcome the technical, logistic and regulatory obstacles that make the circular management of these materials difficult. 

Objectives

• Optimise the zinc reclaim process in order to recover cemented carbide via zinc diffusion. This will significantly reduce the carbon footprint and extend the process to all types of tools via an efficient classification system based on standard marking during production. 
• Develop and advanced chemical recycling process using organic acids from food and agriculture sources, thus enabling high-value metals to be recovered while generating minimum toxic waste, and as such going beyond conventional methods that require large amounts of energy, water and chemical products.

Ceit’s role

Ceit plays a key role in the project via the development of advanced methodologies for the purpose of characterising recycled metal powders, by applying powder metallurgy processing techniques and characterisation of sintered products. Additionally, it is spearheading the creation of coding systems with a view to facilitating traceability and classification of hard metal waste and validating the recycled materials by assessing their composition, microstructure and mechanical properties prior to their use in industrial demonstrations. .