Speaker
Description
Globally, the annual demand for primary aluminium (Al) is estimated at ∼70 million tons and the uses of secondary Al or recycled Al consume only ∼7% of the energy compared to the primary Al.
Hence, it is vital to maximise the reuses and recycling rate of secondary Al to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions in Al industry.
In almost all commercial Al alloys, Fe is the most common detrimental element, which is often accumulated in the sorting and remelting processes and form different type of brittle Fe-rich intermetallic phases, damaging greatly castability and mechanical properties of the alloys.
it is critical to develop efficient and effective methodologies to restrict the detrimental Fe phases or to modify/change the damaging phase morphology into beneficial ones in order to improve the mechanical properties.
Here, I present the recent operando research work of using the fast synchrotron X-ray diffraction and tomography techniques at the ESRF plus machine-learning assisted phase segmentation methods to study the 3D nucleation dynamics of the Fe phases in a typical multiple-component recycled Al alloy; and how co-growth of the multiple Fe phases lead to the formation of the complex and convoluted 3D Chinese-script phases.
In addition, the beneficial effects of applying ultrasound to control the primary Al dendrites and to alter the Fe phase growth dynamics as well as the final 3D morphology were also discussed and elucidated in this work.
