CLEAN TECHNOLOGY FOR EFFICIENT RECYCLING AND ENVIRONMENTAL PRODUCTION OF ALUMINIUM

Purpose and goal

In order to reach its objective to enable automatic scrap sorting and boost the use of recycled materials for aluminium production, two major goals were defined and successfully reached during the course of the project: 1.A robust, flexible and fast aluminium scrap classification and sorting system was developed and successfully demonstrated, based on a very compact laser from Cobolt, advanced machine learning classification algorithms and innovation gripping techniques. 2.A strong partnership was established between Swedish and Brazilian partners along the whole value chain.

Expected results and effects

The very promising project results are expected to lead to the implementation of automatic alloy sorting in complex scrap flow within 2 to 4 years. Owing to this new technology, recycling companies may introduce new practices and methods to radically minimize the impact of aluminium production on the environment (reduced energy consumption and carbon emissions) by optimising aluminium recycling and thereby minimising the need to extract aluminium ore.

Planned approach and implementation

The project activities were successfully run, from the specifications of the recycling application by Novelis to the development of a complete solution (analysis hardware by RISE Acreo based on a dedicated laser from Cobolt, machine learning algorithms for classification by Swerea KIMAB, innovative gripping techniques by ABB) and its evaluation during various lab (at Robotdalen) and field (at Novelis) experiments. The very promising project results are expected to lead to the implementation of automatic alloy sorting, and routes for commercialization have been sketched.