Recycling aluminum (Al) alloys increasingly helps shape a sustainable economy, offering both environmental and financial benefits. Aluminum alloys can be reprocessed many times without losing useful properties. Additionally, recycling uses only 5 % of the energy required to extract and refine new aluminum.
Specialized aluminum alloys — developed for applications such as aviation, transportation, medical, piping, defense, communications and automotive — command premium prices. Supply chain fluctuations can impact price and availability; for example, a magnesium (Mg) shortage has recently affected production of aluminum grades that require this alloying element.
It’s therefore important for recyclers, refiners/remelters, producers, and end users to ascertain exact elemental compositions in incoming scrap streams, in-process grades, and finished products. This report highlights classes of elemental analyzers that can provide easy identification and measurement of aluminum alloys in order to optimize aluminum recycling processes.