Public Funding for Norton Aluminium Limited

The 36 month REALITY project will enable the development and industrial deployment of sensor-based scrap sorting technologies to separate wrought and cast alloys and then to further separate wrought alloys into alloy types for the first time. Full scale recycled scrap based sheet and castings will be produced and evaluated. End-of-life vehicles will be shredded and automatically sorted using state of the art sensing and sorting technologies. The recovered wrought and cast scrap will be alloyed, melt conditioned to remove or tolerate impurities and then supplied for either coil production or for the commercial scale shape casting production by high pressure vacuum diecasting. Materials evaluation and characterisation will be carried out on both the resultant sheet and cast product forms. Cost effective automated separation processes for shredder scrap will enable the closed-loop recycling of end-of-life vehicles back into high performance product forms for new vehicle body manufacture in the UK, providing significant CO2 savings (less or no primary metal) and major cost savings. The UK, the major exporter or the more than 1Mt of aluminium scrap from the EU each year, will be uniquely placed to use rather than export this precious scrap based secondary aluminium alloy resource.

Lightweight crash management systems are of increasing importance for most forms of ground transport. Automotive OEMs like JLR have advanced aluminium automotive body designs but still depend on steel for bumper beams. For rail applications steel based crash systems predominate. Constellium has developed considerably stronger extrusion alloys based on the AA6xxx alloy system that are fully recycling compatible with the sheet used for automotive structures and body panels. Brunel University has developed alloys and casting technologies that enable extrusions and castings to be combined in novel ways to produce a new generation of compact lightweight crash management systems. The envisaged work programme will include a high strength alloy being combined with casting alloys using overcasting techniques and the use of bonded and riveted joints to demonstrate the potential for both increased crash resistance and weight saving. The project will demonstrate and evaluate optimised designs for crash management systems for both automotive and rail transport.

Structural aluminium alloy castings are an essential part of future Low Carbon Vehicle (LCV) body structures. They are presently made from primary aluminium using alloy compositions that are not sufficiently ductile or compatible with the closed loop recycling of end of life vehicles. Research at Brunel University has demonstrated that a novel alloy composition can meet the Jaguar Land Rover requirements for structural castings in terms of mechanical properties, joinability using self-piercing rivets, and a recycled content of 75% including both process and post consumer scrap. The 24 month project will enable high pressure diecastings for structural BIW (Body in White) applications of the new alloy to be developed at Brunel University and demonstrated on an industrial scale as a function of recycled scrap level. The goal is both a fully UK-based supply chain and significant CO2 savings in vehicle production and use.

Awaiting Public Summary

Awaiting Public Summary