MQP extends partnership with UK’s top metals research centre

Aluminium grain refiner specialist MQP has extended its contract with the UK’s top metals research centre to support the drive to make casthouses more efficient.

MQP and Brunel Centre for Advanced Solidification Technology (BCAST) at Brunel University London have worked together for four years to unlock the technology to increase grain refiner efficiency and consistently improve melt quality, resulting in the super-efficient Optifine 5:1 125 development.

The partnership will continue for another year, with BCAST technicians focusing on testing customers’ grain refiners against Optifine to see if they can improve melt quality, bring down waste and carbon emissions, and reduce plants’ overall manufacturing costs. MQP chairman said it was fantastic to continue working with BCAST, moving from a solely research-led project using state-of-the-art High-Resolution Transmission Electron Microscopy (HRTEM) to collaborating with a focus on customer service.

“Casthouses are invited to send us samples of the grain refiners they use, which BCAST technicians put through a rigorous modelling process using our Opticast measuring system, which can now be completed in just 3-5 minutes. As a benchmark, the grain refiners are put to the test against our own Optifine grain refiner due to its high efficiency, which has been elevated way beyond the expectations of 20 years ago thanks to our work with BCAST.”

The collaboration got into full swing after a decade’s research by BCAST into the industry-wide problem of inconsistency of aluminium quality on a global scale, resulting in huge waste and substandard products across manufacturing, from the foil and extrusions sectors to aerospace and automotive. Key to this was the well-documented inconsistency of grain refiner, which is added in the production process to eliminate cracking, waste and poor quality material in billets and slabs for everything from airframes to food cans.

Discovering BCAST had gone even further in studying the Al3Ti layer at the atomic level using HRTEM, the scene was set for a research project to implement the science in an industrial setting. Today, Optifine, which is made with low carbon, green aluminium, is used in the production of over five million tonnes of aluminium alloys annually in 45 major casthouses worldwide, its appeal being that casthouses only need to use a third of the amount of standard TiBAI grain refiners typically used. It can also reduce costs by half, which means fewer coil changes and transportation around the casthouse and lower warehouse inventory.