MAXIMA redesigns electric motors so circularity guides design, use, and end‑of‑life recovery.
As Europe accelerates towards large-scale electrification of road transport, electric machines are becoming a backbone of the clean mobility transition. Yet, each high-performance motor still concentrates metals like copper, aluminium, iron, and critical raw materials that are difficult to replace if they end up dissipated instead of recovered.
MAXIMA (Modular AXIal flux Motor for Automotive), a Horizon Europe project launched in 2023, is tackling this challenge by combining advanced design tools, new materials, and life cycle assessment to develop a modular axial flux motor with lower environmental impact and reduced dependence on critical rare earth elements. Its ambition is not only to create a better motor, but to prove that reduction of environmental impact can guide decisions across the entire value chain, from raw materials to end of life recovery.
Putting life cycle thinking at the heart of design
Within MAXIMA, Work Package 6 (Life Cycle Management) acts as a transversal backbone that connects design, materials development, manufacturing, and system integration. The goal is clear: quantify where the biggest environmental impacts and resource risks occur, and feed that information back into the engineering process while design choices are still flexible. To do this, the team applies life cycle assessment (LCA) to multiple motor concepts and prototypes, covering the full journey from raw material extraction through manufacturing, use, and end of life.
The LCA work is organised around several tasks. One strand evaluates different electric machine designs and manufacturing routes using cradle to grave analysis, comparing production phase emissions, use phase electricity consumption, and end of life scenarios. Another focuses on magnetic materials and new manufacturing processes, including metal injection moulding routes for magnets, soft magnetic composites, and advanced electrical steels. A further task looks at integration into drive prototypes and demonstrators, ensuring that the performance gains seen on the test bench translate into real-world benefits at vehicle level.
By structuring LCA in this way, WP6 can provide targeted feedback: for example, whether a promising new rotor configuration actually reduces climate change impact once the additional aluminium, copper, or magnet mass is taken into account; or how a new magnet manufacturing process compares with conventional routes when scaled to industrial level.
Designing a low‑impact motor as a building block for circularity
Climate change remains a crucial impact category, but MAXIMA’s life cycle work goes further by explicitly considering mineral resource depletion and dissipation. Depletion focused methods assess how a product system contributes to the extraction and long-term scarcity of metals such as copper or aluminium, which are central to high-performance permanent magnets. Dissipation oriented indicators, in turn, ask where and how materials are lost at end of life to forms that are no longer recoverable – for example, when magnets are shredded and mixed into low-grade streams.
This dual lens is particularly relevant for electric motors, where critical raw materials can either be conserved in high-value loops or dispersed beyond practical recovery. By quantifying both depletion and dissipation, MAXIMA’s LCA can distinguish solutions that simply shift burdens from one part of the life cycle to another from those that genuinely improve circularity. Early comparisons of different machine versions already show that design choices which slightly increase production phase impacts can be justified if they deliver significant reductions in use phase energy consumption or enable higher recycling rates for key materials at end of life.
Linking electricity mixes, design choices, and circularity
Another important dimension explored as part of the LCA work is the influence of electricity mixes on the environmental profile of the motor. The same design operated in different national grids – for example, coal-intensive versus renewable dominated systems – can exhibit radically different climate change impacts over its lifetime. Preliminary analyses comparing electricity mixes in countries such as Sweden, Germany, Poland, and a future French 2050 high‑renewable scenario underline how decarbonised power systems increase the importance of low‑impact materials and production choices, while fossil‑heavy mixes lock in higher emissions even when hardware performance is optimised.
For MAXIMA, this means that circularity cannot be treated as purely a materials problem. Design teams must also consider where and how motors will be used, how fast electricity grids are decarbonising, and what this implies for trade offs between production phase impacts and in use efficiency. These complex relationships are translated into practical guidance: for example, showing how different electricity mixes change the relative benefits of each design option, and highlighting where optimising control strategies and thermal management can reduce overall environmental impacts during the use phase.
Designing motors that are born to be recycled
A core element of MAXIMA’s circularity vision lies in end of life strategies, particularly for permanent magnets. Rare earth magnets concentrate high economic and strategic value in small volumes, making them both a risk and an opportunity from a circular economy perspective. Building on specialised recycling research, the project is advancing processes that allow neodymium iron boron magnets to be recovered, purified, and remanufactured while preserving most of their original properties, even after use and contamination.
WP6 models several end‑of‑life scenarios, applying fixed recycling rates for steel, aluminium, and copper while varying the permanent magnet recycling rate from 0% to 100%. For each scenario, LCA results quantify how much climate impact, depletion, and dissipation can be avoided when magnets and metals are recovered into secondary material streams instead of being landfilled or down‑cycled. The analyses show that higher permanent magnet recycling rates deliver particularly strong benefits in terms of mineral resource dissipation, reinforcing the importance of designing motors and dismantling processes that enable magnet extraction. These insights are fed back into the mechanical and electromagnetic design of the machine. Modular architectures, accessible housings, and well defined material fractions all support future disassembly, sorting, and high-quality recycling. In this way, circularity becomes a concrete design constraint: if a concept cannot be dismantled or its critical materials cannot be recovered at scale, it is less likely to be selected as the final solution.
From methodology to market ready impact
By the end of the project, MAXIMA aims to deliver not only axial flux motor prototypes but a complete eco design and life cycle management methodology applicable to future electric machines. The combination of multiphysics design tools, digital twins, life cycle assessment, and dedicated recycling strategies will provide a replicable framework that automotive manufacturers and suppliers can use to balance performance, cost, and circularity.
For Europe’s automotive industry, this approach supports strategic autonomy on critical raw materials, reduces environmental pressures, and strengthens competitiveness in a market where sustainability credentials are increasingly a differentiator. More broadly, it offers a template for how circular economy principles can be turned into rigorous, quantitative design rules in other sectors that rely on complex electro mechanical systems.
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