Brunel Centre for Advanced Solidification Technology (BCAST) at the Brunel University London is partnering with Alloyed, a U.K. company that designs digital solutions for metals manufacturers, on a new project aimed at supporting the development of new aluminum alloys. New alloys are normally developed by tweaking what goes into a standard alloy, then using trial and error based on research — a costly and lengthy process that can take years to come up with an alloy with the right alloy.
Using funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council’s (EPSRC’s) Early-Stage Prosperity Partnerships, BCAST will conduct a £525,000, three-year project to fine-tune and perfect Alloyed’s existing computer modeling system, called Alloys by Design (ABD®), which is designed to analyze and rank thousands of potential aluminum alloy compositions simultaneously. This provides the potential to pinpoint and rapidly develop bespoke alloys.
“The goal is to accelerate the process of design and development of Al alloys for sustainable manufacturing of light metals, mainly for the car industry,” said Hari Babu Nadendla, professor of Metallurgy and Materials at Brunel University London. “Allowing automotive engineers to design lightweight structures made from 100% scrap metal will help consolidate the U.K.’s leading position in low emission vehicle technology and free the supply chain from the uncertainty sourcing ore or primary metal.”
BCAST and Alloyed have worked side by side for the past two years and have already developed new alloys together. The physics-based ABD platform enables metallurgy experts to rapidly simulate millions of available alloys before making and testing them on site. “There’s a good partnership between us already,” said Prof. Nadendla. “We want to develop and refine metallurgical models to make them more efficient and speed up the discovery of new alloys.”
The team aims to use the modified models to make and test three new alloys — one for making future electric cars, a heat-conducting alloy that can be used to 3D-print parts, and an alloy that can be used to make electric cars that can be recycled back into new cars. Scrap metal from cars is recycled, but it is typically used to produce low-value parts like window panels and wheel alloys rather than high-value car parts.
“Industry is very well established in recycling,” said Prof. Nadendla. “But the current way of recycling is not sustainable. We would like to double up and accommodate the end-of-life scrap metal directly as input.”