Completed Materials & Manufacturing Clean Energy

Recycling of Aluminium through Innovative Technology (REALITY)

Funder InnovateUK (part of UKRI)
Recipient organisation Jaguar Land Rover Limited
Funding £1.3M
Period May 2017 — Mar 2020

In plain English

AI plain-English summary

Every year, the UK exports more than a million tonnes of aluminium scrap from end-of-life vehicles rather than reusing it in new car production. The REALITY project aims to change that by developing sensor-based sorting technologies that can, for the first time, separate shredded scrap into specific wrought and cast alloy types. Currently, mixed scrap is too impure to be recycled into high-performance vehicle parts, so manufacturers rely on energy-intensive primary aluminium. Over 36 months, the project will build and test full-scale sorting systems, then produce recycled sheet and castings from the recovered alloys. If successful, the technology would enable closed-loop recycling—shredding old cars, sorting the scrap by alloy, and feeding it directly back into new vehicle body manufacture. This would cut CO₂ emissions by reducing or eliminating the need for primary metal, and deliver major cost savings. The UK, as Europe’s largest scrap exporter, would instead become a domestic supplier of high-quality secondary aluminium, keeping a valuable resource in the country rather than shipping it abroad.

View original technical description
The 36 month REALITY project will enable the development and industrial deployment of sensor-based scrap sorting technologies to separate wrought and cast alloys and then to further separate wrought alloys into alloy types for the first time. Full scale recycled scrap based sheet and castings will be produced and evaluated. End-of-life vehicles will be shredded and automatically sorted using state of the art sensing and sorting technologies. The recovered wrought and cast scrap will be alloyed, melt conditioned to remove or tolerate impurities and then supplied for either coil production or for the commercial scale shape casting production by high pressure vacuum diecasting. Materials evaluation and characterisation will be carried out on both the resultant sheet and cast product forms. Cost effective automated separation processes for shredder scrap will enable the closed-loop recycling of end-of-life vehicles back into high performance product forms for new vehicle body manufacture in the UK, providing significant CO2 savings (less or no primary metal) and major cost savings. The UK, the major exporter or the more than 1Mt of aluminium scrap from the EU each year, will be uniquely placed to use rather than export this precious scrap based secondary aluminium alloy resource.

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Related Research

Grants with similar aims, by meaning.

Upcycling of Light Alloy by Rheoforming Scrap (ULARS)
Scale-up and demonstration of Recyclamet, a novel system for the closed loop recovery of metal and value added residues from waste aluminium slag and drosses
Recycling technologies for circular ALuminium
BACpack
Developing computer vision algorithms for ferrous scrap and secondary materials grading using images and videos as input, incorporating them into digital passports for increasing UK usage of domestically generated scrap.

Original classification

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