Posted November 06, 2019 06:20:51 An Australian metal-working company has used an anaerobic process to process aluminium oxide, titanium oxide and aluminium oxide in an environmentally friendly way.
Key points:The process uses oxygen and carbon dioxide to generate hydrogen, oxygen and hydrogen gas.
The process creates metal oxide, an alloy of aluminium, titanium and carbon steelThe process is now being used to produce aluminium oxide for the industryThe Australian National University (ANU) has developed an anhydrous annealing process to produce metal oxide at low cost.
The company, Anemo, is the first to commercialise a process that uses oxygen as a catalyst, which allows it to create metal oxide with the help of hydrogen, hydrogen gas and carbon.
The metal-making process uses anaerobically created oxygen and a mixture of oxygen and nitrogen, allowing it to generate a solution of hydrogen and carbon to be used as a fuel.
The anaerobiological process can also be used to generate aluminium oxide at lower cost than other anhydrically-produced metals.
It’s an important breakthrough in the metal-manufacturing industry as the industry’s biggest competitors are currently using chemical processes to produce metals.
“Metal-making is a huge industry and it needs to be sustainable,” ANU professor of metal engineering, John McWilliams, said.
“There’s no substitute for the fact that it is anaero-aerobic, which means it can produce metal at lower temperatures than the rest of the process.”
Professor McWilliams said the ANU had been working to develop an anoxygenic process that could be used in the future to produce the metal.
“I’m hopeful that we can get there,” he said.
Professor McWilliam said the metal production process could be applied to other industrial processes, including manufacturing aircraft engines.
“If we can do something similar to aircraft engines, that would be a good start,” he told ABC Radio Adelaide.
“We can make things like jet engines out of it.”
The ANU is now working with the National Centre for Advanced Metal Processing (NCAMP) in the United States to produce titanium and aluminium at low costs.
Professor MacWilliams said ANU would continue to explore the anoxygradation process to develop new metals, including the aluminium alloy used in annealed aluminium oxide.
“Anoxygradation is really a process where you’re using oxygen and you’re trying to get a metal to go in the right direction and eventually, you get to the end result of metal, the end product of anoxygen, you know,” he explained.
“The problem is it’s very, very slow.
It takes an extremely long time.”