#metalcasting #manufacturing Car makers in Britain will be the first to benefit from innovative metal-casting techniques developed at Brunel University in London, thanks to a Government-supported programme to take laboratory discoveries and upscale them for industry.
The £14 million Advanced Metal Casting Centre (AMCC) at Brunel will bridge the gap between fundamental research and full-scale industrial trials. It is jointly funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, the aluminium automotive sheet and extrusions solutions provider Constellium, Brunel and a luxury car manufacturer.
The new facility will draw on the work done by Professor Zhongyun Fan and his team at the Brunel Centre for Advanced Solidification Technology to improve the recyclability of metals. “Our long-term aim,” said Professor Fan, “is to minimise the amount of new metal mined from the ground, by finding ways to make high-quality parts and materials from metal that has already been used at least once.
“For example, in the UK alone, we send around 300,000 tonnes of aluminium to landfill every year. That is a direct economic loss of nearly £800 million and represents a further loss of around 11 million barrels of oil — the energy used to make that amount of aluminium. Clearly, there are many environmental and economic benefits to be gained from re-using that material.”
One project that will be pursued at the AMCC is replacing the hundreds of aluminium alloys currently in commercial use with just over 10 highly versatile alloys that can be used over and over again. Another is to develop a set of techniques for purifying and conditioning liquid metal into reliable industrial processes that can be used to make high-quality castings.