Sustainability in the aluminium industry is a hot topic right now. With COP26 now a distant memory, it is up to industry and governments to implement ‘green’ strategies and new technologies. The aim is to achieve significant reductions in global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in order to keep global warming below 2 °C (vs pre-industrial levels, i.e. the Beyond 2 Degrees Scenario, or B2DS). Ideally it should be below 1.5 °C. The aluminium industry accounts for around 2 – 3% of global GHG emissions annually. Therefore, it has a responsibility to help tackle climate change. This blog explores the ..read more

In this blog Prof. Geoff Scamans tells us about research from the 1980’s which looked at using aluminium as a fuel, and how that theme carries on today. Aluminium as the fuel of the future Figure 1: Cartoon of re-fueling an aluminium-air battery with aluminium anode plates. Back in 1986, when I worked for Alcan, I was the co-author of an article published in New Scientist that proposed aluminium as the fuel of the future. It focused on its use in mechanically rechargeable aluminium-air batteries (1). The carrot dangled was the assumption that if only 1% of cars in the US at the time ran on a ..read more

Our parent company, Danieli, is exceptionally well known within the global steel rolling industry. However, here at Innoval, it’s our aluminium rolling expertise that sets us apart. Members of our Process Group spend most of their time helping our clients with anything from optimising their mill set-ups or assisting with quality issues, to mill feasibility studies and designing new plants. However, what most people don’t realise, is that many of our services are just as applicable to other metals industries, such as the steel rolling industry, as they are to the aluminium industry. This blog b ..read more

Life Cycle Assessment and Sustainability Analysis are becoming ever more important. This is because the environmental impact of products and services is increasingly in the public’s consciousness, as well as the political arena. Furthermore, this focus on sustainability is coming from investors as well as consumers. It is, therefore, vitally important to understand the environmental impact of your product or service. That’s where Life Cycle Assessment comes in and, in this blog, I will briefly explain what it is. What is Life Cycle Assessment? Figure 1: It’s now more important than ever to un ..read more

Every metallographic lab has visible light optical microscopes. In one of my previous blogs, I introduced a method of using optical microscopy to evaluate the cleanliness of an aluminium sheet surface.  This method makes use of the most basic function of an optical microscope; showing the real colours of an object. It’s a simple technique, and not something you can get from an electron microscope. In contrast to this simple way of using visible light optical microscopes, scientists from the University of Manchester have used a conventional optical microscope to perform virtual imaging at ..read more

The word ‘grain’ appears everywhere in aluminium metallurgy. How do we analyse aluminium alloy grains? Why do we want to look at them? I’ll answer these questions in this blog. However, first we need an aluminium metallurgy 101. What is a grain? In the solid state, aluminium atoms occupy a face-centred cubic structure. During solidification regions, or ‘crystallites’, of solid aluminium start to form where the atoms are all aligned in the same orientation. These are called grains. As solidification progresses and these regions start to grow, the intersection between crystallites of different o ..read more

Background The Impol Group produces semi-finished rolled products at three sites in Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia. The company is Slovenia’s biggest producer of flat rolled products and it serves markets as diverse as automotive, pharmacy, food and beverage, construction and renewable energy. At Impol’s plant in Slovenska Bistrica, thin and thick foil products are some of the most important products. Impol’s technical team with Innoval’s consultants. Innoval has been working with Impol for over ten years and we’re proud to have them as a long-term client.  Recently the technical team at ..read more

Specialities Aluminium rolling technology Process engineering Mark is part of our Process Improvement team. He works on optimising aluminium rolling and finishing processes. Background Mark started his career with Algroup/Alcan UK at their Bridgnorth site. Throughout his career with Alcan, and later Novelis, Mark has worked predominantly on the cold and foil rolling of aluminium. He has held leadership positions in Operations, Maintenance and Process Engineering. Following his work at Novelis UK, Mark worked as a project manager for a structural steel company and then as a technological proc ..read more

In this blog I’m going to focus on aluminium recycling and the aluminium “magic” description by Thomas Canby from almost half a century ago. Does this concept still apply today, specifically in the metal’s end-of-life recycled embodiment? The Magic Metal In an article “Aluminum the Magic Metal”, published by National Geographic in 1978, its author, Thomas Canby, approved the societal vision expressed by Nobel Prize-winning chemist Glenn T Seaborg, a former chairman of the US Atomic Energy Commission. He proposed that “the present materials situation is literally reversed: all waste and scrap ..read more

When manufacturing sheet products it’s important to understand the rolling force. This is because you need it to set the appropriate roll gap on the mill, accounting for the stretch of the stand. The prediction of rolling force can be challenging due to the large number of inter-connected process variables involved. However, many years of experience working with rolling mills has allowed us to create the Innoval Rolling Model which gives accurate rolling force predictions. Factors which influence the rolling force Yield strength The main factor influencing the rolling force required to reduce ..read more