13

May

On the road to METEF 2025: Electric Mobility and Aluminium Supply Chain

The results of the European SALEMA project have shown how new recycled aluminum alloys can be made for electric vehicles


Bologna May 2024 – The conference “Electric Mobility and the Aluminum Supply Chain: Results of the European Salema Project” was held at BolognaFiere as part of E-TECH EUROPE, the international exhibition dedicated to electric vehicle manufacturing technologies. An initiative organized by METEF, the international benchmark event of the aluminum world with the aim of presenting the results of an important project that ended just in April this year.

SALEMA is designed to produce new aluminum alloys with a minimum content of Critical Raw Materials (CRM) such as silicon and magnesium by integrating scrap metal recycling.

Prof.Franco Bonollo of the University of Padua moderated the event, emphasizing that “Sustainable mobility cannot do without aluminum. This is the main result of the SALEMA project, funded by the European Union and with significant Italian participation. With innovative aluminum alloys, low in critical raw materials and obtained through recycling, it is possible to produce high-performance automotive components (castings, extrusions, stampings).”

The proceedings opened with a talk by Francesca Cavezza of the European Aluminium Association, who provided an overview of the aluminum sector at the European level and showed how this metal is becoming increasingly strategic for all kinds of applications and innovation with a very strong focus on the circular economy. “Aluminum is revolutionizing sustainable mobility. Not only does this material meet the lightweight and strength requirements of modern vehicles, but by using aluminum from end-of-life sources, dependence on critical raw materials can be reduced. By promoting a circular economy model, aluminum stands at the center of a more sustainable future in the automotive sector.”

In the specific electric vehicle sector, there is a steady increase in the use of aluminum in both casting components, especially mega- and giga-cast, and extruded parts. For this process, in particular, an increase of 5.6 percent is forecast between now and 2030.

Ninety-five percent of the aluminum found in cars is recycled, and considering this high percentage, it was emphasized how important it is to maintain end-of-life car fleets in Europe to allow as much aluminum as possible to be recovered. Attention should also be paid to the post-crushing process of the recovered components to enable a high-quality metal to be obtained.

This was followed by a panel discussion with representatives from three project partner companies: Ruggero Zambelli of Raffmetal, a manufacturer of aluminum alloys from recycling; Claudio Mus of Endurance Overseas, a manufacturer of die-cast components; and Giovanni Sbrega of Profilglass, a laminated and press-forged metal supplies manufacturer.

“The use of aluminum scrap in the production of automotive alloys,” reports Raffmetal’s Ruggero Zambelli,”is essential to reducing CO2 emissions and, in the specific case of the SALEMA project, also to reducing the use of critical elements as they are already contained in the scrap itself used.”

According to Claudio Mus, “Sustainability in transportation will only be achieved through consistent activities across the entire production chain and the use of low-emission vehicles. New product concepts must respond to the principles of the 4Rs (reduce, reuse, regenerate, recycle) starting from the choice of raw materials. SALEMA demonstrated how close collaboration between academia, industry, and OEMs ensures concrete developments in the path to carbon neutrality and sustainability in Europe. A cross-fertilization between EU projects also offers important opportunities for synergies, benefiting the competitiveness of European companies/products. A concrete example: a variant of SALEMA alloys can be applied in the manufacture of battery containers-IPCEI Batteries & EuBatIn.”

For Giovanni Sbrega, “The SALEMA project has issued an ambitious sustainability challenge to aluminum producers: to reduce the use of critical raw materials in automotive alloys. Profilglass took it up, and, with a view to developing alloys with a lower environmental impact and to incentivizing an economy that is increasingly geared toward circularity, it developed and proposed, within the project, alloys for flat-rolled products with a high recycling content that were suitable for hot and cold press-forging. For this process it has defined the entire route, from scrap treatment to laminate production, demonstrating that it is possible to obtain highperformance components from a material with a high recycled content.”

Andrea Bongiovanni of the Stellantis Group, who, as part of the SALEMA project, validated as an end-user the alloys studied and the manufactured components, spoke at the conclusion of the proceedings. Considering that, according to industry consensus estimates, the amount of aluminum in cars will grow by +50 kilograms by 2030, Andrea Bongiovanni pointed out that “The use of sustainable materials enables OEMs to achieve decarbonization goals, which are necessary for CO2 abatement, and the lightweight casting alloys developed within the SALEMA project meet these requirements. As the end user of the SALEMA project, Stellantis defined the structural requirements of the demonstrator by contributing to the development and validation of the final product.”

Riccardo Ferrario, creator of the Giga Press, was present at the event and was invited to testify about the evolution and revolution in giga casting offering a totally different scenario in the automotive sector today.
Ferrario reported that the path taken represents an interesting evolution of what was being done in the recent past when innovations came from the simplicity of the solutions adopted.

The morning then continued with the conference “High-performance alloys: opportunities for the automotive sector within the NRRP,” organized by the Italian Metallurgy Association, sponsored by METEF and moderated by Prof. Ceschini (University of Bologna) and Raffaelli (Lamborghini) in which the strategic role of metallurgy in automotive innovation was emphasized. The challenges of sustainable mobility require increasingly innovative use of metal alloys, optimizing processes, and increasing performance. Metallurgy researchers from the Universities of Bologna, Brescia, Ancona, Pisa, Udine, and Padua, which are involved in the NRRP MOST (National Center for Sustainable Mobility) and iNEST projects, presented their results reached so far.

The issues addressed in these two conferences will be taken up and further explored as part of METEF 2025 March 5-7 at BolognaFiere.