Health and Safety Risk Assessment in a LIB Recycling Plant: a cyber-physical approach

The demand and production of lithium-ion batteries has been growing from the past few years, creating a need of recycling the metals that it composes to reduce the environmental impact and to extend its lifecycle and since the cathode is composed by high value metals, recover them to abate resource scarcity. The Black Mass is the intermediate product derived from the lithium-ion batteries recycling process that contains valuable metals such as Lithium, Cobalt, Nickel and Manganese. Separating these metals is a complex process that involves different type of risks for the operators depending on the process structure and on the separation method; this thesis shows the different type of risks that an operator faces in a Black Mass separation plant structured for the Microwave Assisted Method to recover LiCO2 from spent Black Mass. The study case is carried out in two scenarios (Manual and Semi-automated) and involves two types of operators: a young one and an elderly one. Both are exposed to different risk level based on human physiological, environmental and manufacturing process data using a human-cyber-physical system to calculate the risk. As expected, the result shows that the risks in the semi-automated scenario are lower due to less exposure. Additionally, the elderly operator faces higher risks compared to the younger operator, primarily due to physiological factors