The Advanced Propulsion Centre (APC) is investing £73 million in five collaborative research and development projects with support from government and industry leaders in the automotive supply chain to build zero-emission vehicles, and a drastically reduced carbon footprint supply chain with an aim of a carbon neutral industry while safeguarding thousands of jobs in the UK.
Low carbon solutions require tight collaboration across the automotive supply chain towards carbon neutrality. Two of Amalgamated Metal Corporation (AMC Group) businesses’; Milver Metals an industry leading producer of low carbon secondary aluminium and Scanmetals UK, a global pioneer in recovering non-ferrous metals from Incinerated Bottom Ash (IBA) are proud to be taking part in one of these five government funded projects aiming to redefine how industry manages recycled aluminium. Constellium is leading this £10 million project, together with its consortium partners called CirConAl (Circular and Constant Aluminium) to achieve lower carbon, lower cost recycled aluminium alloys that meets or exceeds OEM requirements such as strength, crushability, durability, and other performance criteria. Milver and Scanmetals UK are achieving this by using their cutting-edge scrap sorting technologies to ensure that valuable metal is recycled back into automotive solutions.
The CirConAl project will provide the lowest embodied CO2e content extrusion aluminium alloys for the automotive industry, enabling light weighting at ultra-low embodied CO2e content of <1.0t of CO2e per tonne of aluminium. This will be achieved by upcycling post-consumer scrap in automotive alloys while keeping the same or better performance as same alloys made from primary aluminium.
Milver and Scanmetals UK together with Consortium will leverage their technical expertise to provide recycled aluminium for the proposed low CO2e alloys for validation by CirConAl OEM partners.
The CirConAl R&D projects will deliver the major and minor impurity tolerance limits for a complete range of high strength and high crush resistant aluminium extrusion alloys to eventually replace the conventional aluminium alloys used today in the manufacture of structural automotive components, thereby transforming the industry from a high to a low embodied CO2e provider.
AMC Group’s Managing Director David Sher notes on the project: “We’re delighted to work with great partners such as Constellium and Brunel to break new ground in decarbonisation and materials security. We hope this project can unlock electric vehicles with the lowest embodied CO2 by finding new and innovative ways to get a much higher recycled content into cars.”
