Influence of glass, sulfur and alkali metal salts on the porosity of recycled aluminum

Abstract

The Applied Metallurgy course students of industrial Chemistry Career performed a research to look for an improvement in the Aluminum material porosity melted from recycled aluminum cans of soda drinks and others.

In order to develop the study, it was necessary to take as starting point the low aluminum production that exists in our country, being only generated by artesian melting processes. Nevertheless, during these processes, the aluminum produced shows low hardness and therefore high porosity. This prevents the commercialization of the recycled aluminum in foreign countries. That is why we have decided to look for an adequate chemical composition to produce high hardness aluminum from the recycled cans.

Due to this objective a melting oven was made and its purpose was to develop different aluminum alloys containing sulfur, glass, table salt and baking soda in different compositions, and then after to measure their densities and hardness. A comparison was performed for the different hardness and densities against the chemical composition and the porosity of the material produced from the recycling process. On the other hand, another objective is to get of high purity using different compositions of alkaline metals salts as smelter and applying a clean production technology into the process.