The Carbon Trust provided essential financial support. It helped us undertake and accelerate this groundbreaking research, which has the potential to make a significant impact on energy consumption from the production of aluminium on a global scale. Working with the team was very easy. In addition to the funding, the milestone reporting and effective monitoring of the project along the way helped maintain discipline and momentum.
Sergei Molokov, Professor of Applied Mathematics, Coventry University
The challenge
Aluminium is remarkable for being such a light, strong, corrosion-resistant and easy to recycle metal. Globally, we use upwards of 27m tonnes of it every year to make a huge variety of products. However, the manufacture of aluminium is responsible for 2% of global electricity consumption and around 170m tonnes of CO2 a year.
Business case
For those involved in producing aluminium, there is a huge incentive for finding ways to create efficiencies; even small improvements have the potential to realise huge energy and associated cost savings. Scientists at Coventry University believed they had discovered a new technique that could reduce the power consumption of a conventional aluminium smelting operation by between 5% and 20%. However, the company required experimental validation rather than theoretical proof, so the University turned to the Carbon Trust for help through our R&D funding scheme.
The approach
Using £150,000 from the Carbon Trust, Coventry University was able to build an experimental facility to test their new technique, utilising facilities within the University of Warwick.
Sergei Molokov, Professor of Applied Mathematics at Coventry University explains, “We came up with the world’s first scaled down reproduction of a bath measuring just 30cm2. Not only is it small enough to stand on a desk-top making it very convenient to work with, it also reproduces the instabilities experienced by its full scale counterparts. Normally it is very hard to do this accurately. This scaling down is a breakthrough in itself even before it allowed us to achieve the results.”
Using the innovative replica, the team was then able to validate their theory – that by applying an alternating current on top of the direct current, they could stabilise fluctuations in the molten metal in the experimental cell, resulting in a very significant 17% reduction in the energy of fluctuations.
The future
The team was successful in validating the mathematical models developed by Coventry University and demonstrating the potential of the technology to Rio Tinto Alcan. This success has set the foundation for future work between Coventry University and Rio Tinto Alcan that focuses on developing the technology and applying it to industrial scale aluminium smelting. This future work will help to determine the level of actual, operational, energy savings that can be realised in these industrial scale applications.
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