The August JOM-e: The Aluminum Plenary Session

This article is one of six papers to be presented exclusively on the web as part of the August 2000 JOM-e the electronic supplement to JOM.
	The following article appears as part of JOM-e, 52 (8) (2000), http://www.tms.org/pubs/journals/JOM/0008/Robinson/Robinson-0008.html JOM is a publication of The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society

During the 2000 TMS Annual Meeting, which was held March 12–16 in Tennessee’s Opryland Hotel and Convention Center, the TMS Light Metals Division broke with tradition by striking all of the Monday morning sessions from its traditional programming grid in favor of presenting an all-division plenary session. The goal of this session was to provide insight into critical issues in modern aluminum processing technology and industrial development. Invited to give the roughly 30 minute presentations were six internationally recognized experts in areas of fundamental interest, including raw materials, reduction, metal treatment, casting and solidification, fabrication, markets, and recycling. Like the TMS Light Metals Division itself, the event had a strong multi-national flavor.

While introducing the session to hundreds of attendees, organizer and moderator Ray Peterson of IMCO Recycling noted that the presentations would soon be appearing on the Internet at the TMS web site. True to his word, this month’s issue of JOM features the proceedings of the session as an installment of JOM-e. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this approach, JOM-e is the journal’s web-based supplement that presents papers in electronic format exclusively. There is no print counterpart. These papers are a part of the journal in every sense of the word; they just have web addresses rather than page numbers.

This month’s JOM-e eschews the conventional text approach in favor of audio-based presentations. If your web browser has a recent version of the free RealPlayer plug-in, you will not only hear the presentations as they were delivered but you will also see the visuals used by the authors.

Of course, the technology would be pointless if the core content were trivial or unengaging. Fortunately, the presentations, like the presenters, were of good quality and highly complementary in terms of tone, message, and perspective. All that was lacking was time for questions and answers.

The symposium began with an overview of the global aluminum industry by Richard B. Evans, executive vice president of Alcan Aluminum and president of the Alcan Global Fabrication Group. In the presentation, Evans underscored the need for technology to be developed and applied based on the needs of the marketplace; a close, interactive relationship between these areas must be the driver of development. To illustrate the point, Evans recounted successes in the packaging and transportation sectors while using the example of a engineered language to illustrate how introducing a perfect product into a market void of demand is an express route to failure.

Next, Harald A. Øye, professor at the Institute of Chemistry, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, noted that he was on hand to “tell everything I know about materials used in smelting, and that means alumina, pitch, coke, anodes, carbon blocks, ramming paste, and refractory and insulation bricks.” Øye knows considerably more than 30 minutes worth of information on these materials, so he elected to make the discussion manageable by focusing only on basic properties, problems, and challenges. Unfortunately, a technical glitch during the presentation prohibits us from delivering an audio version of the paper.

The third presentation was delivered by Barry J. Welch, professor in the Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering at the University of Auckland. Welch used both images and video to consider opportunities for advancing the capabilities of the Hall-Héroult process. He observed that the design and operating advances achieved in the last quarter century ensure that the Hall-Héroult technology will hold a competitive advantage over alternative aluminum production processes for some time. He then noted that with the high current efficiencies and low margins for error in modern cells, today’s challenge is to refine designs, control strategies, and operating practices so that further marginal gain and economic performance can be achieved.

The second half of the morning’s talks began with a perspective on aluminum metal treatment by C. Edward Eckert, president of Apogee Technology and Quantum Environmental Dynamics. His objective comprised informing the audience about the broad goals of metal treatment, describing how the difficult challenges of treating aluminum compare with those of treating other commercial metal systems, discussing what is driving the development of new aluminum treatment processes, noting the evolutionary process of how the field has developed, and offering perspectives on where the field needs to go (environment considerations are a growing concern, as is a paucity of fundamental work).

Prospective and retrospective views of the industry and the field through the prism of aluminum solidification processing were the focus of the presentation by Diran Apelian, Howmet Professor of Engineering and director of the Metal Processing Institute at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Concisely, Apelian provided a holistic review of solidification processing, including where we have been, where we are going, and what are the exciting frontiers facing the industry (e.g., mastery of measures and controls and accurate modeling). Particular note was given to the significant increases in the use of cast-aluminum net-shaped components. For example, in 1980 there were 800,000 tons of aluminum casting shipments in North America. By 1998, the figure had climbed to 1,800,000 tons.

The session ended downstream with a presentation by Elwin Rooy, a consultant formerly of Alcoa. His topic: issues in aluminum fabrication and application. As with the first presenter, he underscored the vital symbiotic relationship between process and market development. He employed historical perspectives to illustrate that the evolution of processes for aluminum’s multivaried commercial shapes and forms paralleled the industry’s successes in determined applications and market penetration. Remelted and cast products represent a rapidly growing manufacturing sector.

All in all, the symposium gave us a morning that was grounded in history, upbeat about the technology, mindful of the marketplace, and excited about the future. For more detail, visit the August issue of JOM.