Metal
Presently, E&HE vehicles bodies are characterized by several types of reusable metallic components, which account for about the 60-70% in weight. At the current state of the art, metal parts of vehicles at the End Of Life or crashed are scrapped and recycled via re-melting. However, this recycling path is relatively expensive and energy intensive.
Contrarily adopting a circular economy approach, many metal parts could be reused, avoiding thermal processes and its relative expenses in terms of costs and energy consumption. In particular, in the CarE-Service project multiple re-use strategies will be exploited upon the nature of the components removed from the E&HE vehicles:
Chassis and platform components will be reused in their original shape and function. For these components, new designs of demountable joining interfaces and specific certification methods will be developed to facilitate disassembly and guarantee safety.
Load bearing superstructure components (such as door and roof pillars) will be reused with minor adjustments. Since they are significantly affected by different design from one car generation to the next, new joining techniques allowing to obtain modular parts that can be reused with minor adjustments in different models of cars or in new restyled versions will be developed. In addition, the suitability of reforming technologies will be investigated both form a technical and economic point of view.
Outer skin and design elements will be reused in two ways. The first one is to quickly disassemble the elements and reuse them as cheap spare parts in the same models of cars. The second way is to remanufacture these parts to obtain components fitting with new or other models of cars, or even parts for other type of vehicles or products. It will be also possible to obtain metal parts for mopeds, electric bikes or even for other applications, such as office chairs in the furniture industry.
