The project partners Suldouro have collected two forms of scrap; the first containing used beverage cans and the second containing larger wrought and cast aluminium components. The waste has been sorted by Suldouro to remove non-metal and plastic fractions and was sent to Idalsa for re-melting. Idalsa have produced ingots from each type of scrap which are now suitable as a feedstock for the high shear process. The composition of each recycled ingot, prior to HSP, is given in Table 1. These compositions are very promising for the project, the heavy scrap fraction making a good starting point for a structural casting alloy and the lighter fraction potentially good for AA6xxx structural sheets or an extrusion alloy. The Brunel team are now making calculations based on the Aluminium-Iron phase diagram to find the optimum processing conditions for these recycled compositions and determine how much iron can be removed from each alloy. The next step will be to use the HSP to process these alloys, the characterisation of these recycled alloys can then begin.
Table 1: The composition of scrap material to be used in the project.
Scrap Type | Al | Fe | Si | Mg | Mn | Cu | Cr | Ti |
Larger Wrought/Cast Scrap A | 96.83 | 0.884 | 0.934 | 0.010 | 1.115 | 0.134 | 0.016 | 0.015 |
Used Beverage Cans B | 95.77 | 1.058 | 1.377 | 0.007 | 1.025 | 0.435 | 0.054 | 0.024 |
Figure 1: Showing the two scrap fractions used for the project which have been re-melted to produce a feedstock suitable for the processing with the high shear equipment at Brunel University.