PASSENGER D4.9 - Environment, health and safety of the PASSENGER value chains-R2
Creators: name: Innocenzi, Valentina
name: Beolchini, Francesca
name: Vegliò, Francesco
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2024

description: This document presents the main results from task 4.6 of the PASSENGER project, focusing on health and safety issues for permanent magnet production.D 4.9 is the ninth deliverable of WP4, which centres on the safety analysis of permanent magnets (PM) production. During each manufacturing process involving chemicals, potential health, safety, and environmental (HSE) hazards must be identified, analysed, and managed as early as possible to avoid negative consequences (higher risks and costs).Needs are growing to include these aspects in every decision-making process development. For these reasons, specific studies have been performed to evaluate the production processes of magnets, also considering this point of view according to D4.1. The main scope was to compare the manufacturing process of PM with rare earths (REE) and those without them of interest to the Passenger project.The document describes the production processes of bonded magnets (NdFeB and ferrites) and sintered MnAlC magnets.These processes have been compared with the production routes in the Passenger project.The HSE assessment includes different approaches following available data about the processes.The first study is on the intrinsic hazards of chemicals using the information in MSDSs and considering the European CLP classification. A preliminary hazard analysis (PHA) was performed, followed by an innovative method, HAZard and OPerability analysis (HAZOP), integrated by HSE (HAZOP-HSE).In existing HAZOP and safety integrity level (SIL), process-related risks are considered, and those for workers are neglected. Instead, HSE engineering depicts a detailed design directly related to operator safety, disregarding human risks. The HAZOP-HSE technique combines the two to integrate information better. In more detail, HSE-HAZOP is a technique that can be used to examine the systematic and efficient application of HSE engineering by leveraging the HAZOP methodical risk analysis technique and a quantitative risk derivation method, an advantage of SIL.In terms of the results obtained, the production of a permanent NdFeB magnet (especially sintered ones) poses greater health risks to the workers involved than the production of a rare-earth-free magnet, although appropriate precautions should be maintained in both cases. The most significant risks are related to the chemical and physical properties of raw materials (e.g., the reactivity of rare earths) and the production processes (e.g., hydrogen-assisted methods and high-temperature operations), which use chemicals, such as acids, that are more hazardous to health and more polluting than the substances used in the production cycle of rare-earth-free magnets.Therefore, it can be argued that the safety and health of workers can be an additional strength of rare earth-free magnets at the expense of those that use rare earth instead and that the line taken by the project to replace this second category of magnets is also a viable solution from the point of view of production process safety.
description: This deliverable is currently under review by the European Commission.