MAXIMA has redesigned electric motors to be circular in design, use, and end-of-life recovery.
As Europe accelerates towards large-scale electrification of road transport, electric machines are becoming the backbone of the clean mobility transition. However, each high-performance motor still has a high concentration of metals and critical raw materials such as copper, aluminum, and iron, which are difficult to replace if they dissipate without being recovered.
MAXIMA (Modular Axial Flux Motors for Automotive), a Horizon Europe project launched in 2023, is addressing this challenge by combining advanced design tools, new materials, and lifecycle assessments to develop modular axial flux motors with lower environmental impact and less dependence on critical rare earth elements. The goal is not only to develop better motors, but also to prove that reducing environmental impact can guide decisions throughout the value chain, from raw materials to end-of-life recovery.
Putting lifecycle thinking at the center of design
Within MAXIMA, Work Package 6 (Life Cycle Management) serves as the cross-cutting backbone connecting design, materials development, manufacturing, and systems integration. The goal is clear. Quantifying where the greatest environmental impacts and resource risks occur and feeding that information back into the engineering process while maintaining flexibility in design choices. To do this, the team applied life cycle assessment (LCA) to multiple motor concepts and prototypes, covering the entire journey from raw material extraction to manufacturing, use, and end-of-life.
LCA work is organized around several tasks. One strand uses cradle-to-grave analysis to evaluate different electrical machine designs and manufacturing routes, comparing production-phase emissions, use-phase power consumption, and end-of-life scenarios. The other focuses on magnetic materials and new manufacturing processes, such as magnets, soft magnetic composites, and metal injection molding routes for advanced electrical steel sheets. Further tasks will consider integrating the drive into prototypes and demonstrators to ensure that the performance gains seen on the test bench translate into real-world benefits at vehicle level.
Configuring LCA in this way allows WP6 to provide targeted feedback. For example, whether a promising new rotor configuration actually reduces the effects of climate change given the additional aluminum, copper, or magnet mass. Or how the new magnet manufacturing process compares to traditional routes when scaled up to an industrial level.
Designing a low-impact motor as a component to achieve circularity
While climate change remains an important impact category, MAXIMA’s lifecycle work goes further by explicitly considering mineral resource depletion and dissipation. Methods focused on attrition assess how product systems contribute to the extraction and long-term scarcity of metals such as copper and aluminum, which are central to high-performance permanent magnets. Dissipation-oriented metrics ask where and how material is lost at the end of its life to a form that can no longer be recovered. For example, when magnets are shredded and mixed into a low-grade stream.
This dual lens is particularly relevant for electric motors where critical raw materials may be stored in high-value loops or dispersed beyond practical recovery. By quantifying both attrition and dissipation, MAXIMA’s LCA can distinguish between solutions that simply shift burdens from one part of the lifecycle to another and those that truly improve circularity. Initial comparisons of different machine versions have already shown that design choices that slightly increase the impact on the production phase can be justified if they can significantly reduce energy consumption during the use phase or increase the recycling rate of key materials at the end of their service life.
Connecting power mixes, design choices, and circularity
Another important aspect investigated as part of the LCA work is the effect of power mix on the motor’s environmental profile. When the same design is operated in different national grids (e.g., coal-intensive versus renewable energy-dominated systems), it can exhibit fundamentally different climate change impacts over its lifetime. Preliminary analysis comparing electricity mixes in countries such as Sweden, Germany and Poland with a future 2050 high renewable energy scenario for France reveals that decarbonized electricity systems will increase the importance of low-impact materials and production options, while fossil fuel-rich electricity mixes will increase emissions even when hardware performance is optimized.
For MAXIMA, this means that circularity cannot be treated purely as a material issue. Design teams must also consider where and how the motor will be used, the rate of decarbonization of the electricity grid, and what this means for the trade-off between production stage impact and efficiency of use. These complex relationships are translated into practical guidance. For example, we show how different power combinations change the relative merits of each design option and highlight where optimizing control strategies and thermal management can reduce the overall environmental impact during the use phase.
Motor design made to be recycled
A core element of MAXIMA’s circular vision lies in its end-of-life strategy, especially for permanent magnets. Rare earth magnets are both a risk and an opportunity from a circular economy perspective, as they have high economic and strategic value concentrated in small quantities. The project is based on expert recycling research and is developing a process that allows neodymium iron boron magnets to be recovered, purified and remanufactured while retaining most of their original properties even after use and contamination.
WP6 models several end-of-life scenarios applying fixed recycling rates for steel, aluminum, and copper while varying the recycling rate for permanent magnets from 0% to 100%. For each scenario, the LCA results quantify the extent to which climate impacts, depletion, and dissipation could be avoided if the magnets and metals were recovered as a secondary material stream rather than landfilled or downcycled. The analysis shows that high recycling rates of permanent magnets provide particularly significant benefits in terms of mineral resource dissipation, highlighting the importance of motor design and disassembly processes that enable magnet extraction. These insights feed back into the mechanical and electromagnetic design of the machine. The modular architecture, easy-to-access housing, and well-defined material parts all support future disassembly, sorting, and high-quality recycling. Circularity thus becomes a concrete design constraint. If a concept cannot be disassembled or its critical materials cannot be recovered at scale, it is unlikely to be chosen as the final solution.
From methodology to market impact
By the end of the project, MAXIMA aims to provide not only a prototype axial flux motor, but also a complete eco-design and lifecycle management methodology that can be applied to future electrical machines. The combination of multiphysics design tools, digital twins, lifecycle assessments, and purpose-built recycling strategies provides a replicable framework that automakers and suppliers can use to balance performance, cost, and circularity.
For the European automotive industry, this approach supports strategic autonomy regarding critical raw materials, reduces environmental pressures and strengthens competitiveness in a market where sustainability certification is increasingly a differentiating factor. More broadly, it provides a template for how circular economy principles can be translated into rigorous, quantitative design rules in other fields that rely on complex electromechanical systems.
Please note: This is a commercial profile
This article will also be published in circular economy publications.
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