EUROPEAN CONGRESS AND EXHIBITION ON ADVANCED MATERIALS AND PROCESSES - EUROMAT 2021

Zeolites are hydrated aluminosilicate minerals with a three-dimensional open structure consisting of aluminium and silicon tetrahedra linked by shared oxygen atoms. Due to this structure, zeolites are characterized by high specific surface and cations exchange capacity making them very useful in environmental pollution remediation. Literature data have documented the synthesis of zeolite using...

Circular Economy is a regenerative approach to reduce the waste generated and guarantee the eco-sustainability of post-use products. When a product reaches the end of its life, it is reused to generate high added-value materials, which reduces both the need for primary materials and waste production [1]. This explains the growing interest among the scientific community to develop and optimize...

Rare earth elements (REEs) and their compounds are essential for quickly growing advanced technologies. These materials are essential in the area of green/sustainable energy. However, efficient separation and purification of REEs still remain challenging. Additionally, current extraction technologies frequently generate large amounts of wastes. In that perspective, the development of efficient...

Over the last decades, the negative consequences of climate change and the exhaustion of fossil fuels have brought to the forefront one major challenge: the energy crisis. Thermoelectric materials can significantly contribute to the solution of this problem because of their capability to convert heat into electricity and vice versa. Half-Heusler (HH) compounds were recently identified as...

The need to reduce global warming and the usage of fossil fuels as well as the increased worldwide energy demand, led the researchers to discover alternative energy resources. Thermoelectric technology has been studied for more than two centuries and is based on the energy conversion of waste heat into electricity. The good reliability and scalability combined with the fact that no moving...

Emerging technologies, such as Na-ion, Zn-air or Al-based batteries (AIBs), constitute excellent alternatives to more mature energy storage devices like Li-ion batteries. In particular, AIBs offer high energy densities, high cyclability and increased safety. Moreover, aluminium is the most abundant metal in the earth's crust and an advanced industry for its production and recycling has already...

Storing thermal energy in the summer and re-using it in the winter could be a game-changer for reducing energy consumption. In the EU, 3.6 EJ/year are used for heating, 28 GJ per-capita. The source of this energy comprises 47% natural gas, 16% oil products, 9% biofuel/waste, 3% coal. Saving even a small fraction of this energy would provide an enormous reduction in fuel consumption.
Seasonal...

The development of low dimensional micro- and nanostructures of ternary compounds with controlled morphology and composition is recently gaining increasing attention due to their improved functionalities and enhanced performance in diverse fields of research. However their fabrication is not an easy task and diverse synthesis approaches have been followed so far.
In this work Ni-based...

Comminution is the process through which the size of rock extracted from a mine is reduced, so that a certain mineral can be more easily obtained. This stage is the one that uses the most energy in the copper production process. Therefore, a reduction in the energy consumption of comminution would have a significant impact in the industry and also in the environment, as CO2 emissions can be...

The steadily increasing amount of ultra-fine iron ores, especially magnetite, due to the intensive beneficiation of low-grade ore deposits in combination with the industrial de-carbonization towards a hydrogen-based economy, require new solutions for the iron and steel industry. Taking the endothermic behavior of the hydrogen-based reduction of iron ore into account, a pre-heating step of the...

The present paper deals with investigations conducted on waste glasses as components of new sustainable binders. Waste glasses include materials from the melting of inorganic waste (such as fly ash from coal combustion, red mud from refining of aluminum-rich minerals, etc.) as well as cullet from the dismantling of common articles. In fact, strict recycling is not always feasible, for risks of...

Basic oxygen furnace slag (BOFS) is a by-product of the steelmaking process, of which about 10.4 Mt are produced annually in the European Union. Besides its predominant use in road construction, earthwork, and hydraulic engineering, it is also possible to use BOFS as a source material for Portland cement clinker.
The main difference in the chemical composition of BOFS from the chemical...

During iron and steel production, several by-products such as slags, dusts and sludges are generated in addition to pig iron and steel as primary products. While established recycling routes exist for slags, there are still considerable recycling problems for other residual materials, especially for filter dusts and sludges containing zinc and lead from waste gas purification. However, the...

Following the China’s ban on foreign trash and media coverage on the presence of microplastics in the environment, there is a pressing need to develop a sound management strategy for plastic waste. Thermochemical reactions, especially catalytic pyrolysis, is identified as the most promising solution to convert plastic waste into liquid fuels and chemical feedstock. At present, there are...

The increasing world population and waste production, together with the excessive levels of resource extraction, generate a growing demand to move the society towards a circular bio-economy and to use environmentally friendlier materials. Therefore, the development of greener materials and the use of waste materials as raw materials are of great interest. The aim here is to produce laminated...

Modern cultural and governmental attitudes towards sustainability are progressing industry towards a circular economy model. Here, the reuse, recycling and remanufacturing of products prolongs the useful lifetime of materials. Metallic scrap, generated during conventional manufacture and at the end of life of metallic components, is often recycled into a raw product suitable for the production...

Methane pyrolysis is a process that produces hydrogen and solid carbon through the thermal decomposition of methane or natural gas (CH4 => 2 H2 + C). This process has the potential of enabling a sustainable hydrogen production with low to zero CO2 emission. In 2016, roughly 60 million tons of hydrogen were produced worldwide. If current production processes like steam methane reforming ...

In this work, carbon free pyrometallurgical treatment of non-ferrous iron residue was studied. This approach aimed to recover the valuable metals and convert the material into reusable benign slag using hydrogen as non-fossil reducing agent. Pyrometallurgical treatments involve two stages (oxidation and reduction). The use of hydrogen as a reducing agent after oxidative smelting was studied...

There has been growing concern in recent years about the security of supply of strategic raw and advanced materials that are critical for our modern technologies. This is the case of Rare Earth Permanent Magnets (REPMs) and Li-ion Batteries (LiB). For the latter, Europe is almost fully dependant on import of both battery cells and their constituting raw and processed materials, exposing the...

The use of aluminium-based alloys has been steadily increasing in different product sectors such as transportation, construction, electronics, packaging, etc. Recycling of materials from end-of-life products is essential to close the material loop and reduce the environmental footprint in production. The increasing use of aluminimum in packaging applications results in many different...

Li-RE codoped ZnO nanostructured particles were prepared by the polyol method at low temperature and short growth times. Different contents of lithium were evaluated, keeping constant the Nd&GD atomic %. The nominal stoichiometric composition has been: (Zn1-y-xREyLixO, y=0.0, 0.02, x=0, 01, 0.015, 0.02, 0.025). The samples were analyzed using X-ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electron...

Carbon dioxide electrochemical reduction reaction (CO2ERR) is a route to convert unwanted CO2 into chemical products of interest (ethanol, methane…). Actual conversion processes present problems of low efficiency and selectivity. The main challenge for implementing CO2ERR is by finding novel electrocatalysts and optimized process conditions to achieve more selective production of the intended...

Niobium oxides have proved to have excellent properties for use in coatings, photocatalysis or energy storage and sensing devices. Added benefits of the use of these niobium oxides are their biocompatibility, non-toxicity and resistance to corrosion. This can increase the lifetime of the material and facilitate the recuperation if it is used in liquid environments (for example, used as...

Indoor lighting has a substantial influence on people’s wellbeing but are often non-sustainable, made of glass or plastics. Wood, a renewable and CO2-storing material with excellent mechanical properties, is a promising substrate for developing sustainable indoor lighting materials [1].
State-of-art reports of wood-based lighting applications make use of potentially toxic quantum dots as...

At Davos 2019, the World Economic Forum welcomed POSCO as ‘Lighthouse Factories’ for spearheading innovation in manufacturing. POSCO is the first South Korean company to receive such recognition, through its smart-factory platform to drive productivity and quality improvements in the steel industry.

POSCO has leveraged artificial intelligence to drive productivity and quality improvements...

The Data Centre Industry (DCI) is concentrated in North-West Europe, especially UK, Germany, France & Netherlands. DC equipment is replaced every 1–5 years, substantially contributing to the production of WEEE (Waste Electrical & Electronic Equipment), one of the fastest growing waste streams. WEEE contains Critical Raw Materials of high technical and economic importance and vulnerable to...

The role of critical materials in the economy has been highlighted by the European Union (EU) as requisites to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. There are several methodologies to assess the impact of material use and benefits of material recycling, such as Life Cycle Assessment or Material Flow Analysis. However, criticality is mainly overlooked in these assessments. In this article,...

Resilient supply chains are of high relevance for the sustainability of systems. Their supply chains are often complex and exposed to a variety of risks potentially causing supply disruptions. An example of a recent supply disruption event is the COVID-19 pandemic, which has caused supply disruption within the global supply chains of, for example, battery electric vehicles. Existing...

In spintronics, magnetic tunnel and giant magnetoresistive junctions have been used for read heads for data storage, magnetic memories and sensors [1]. Current technology uses CoFeB as a ferromagnetic layer with a face-centred cubic crystalline structure induced by seed layers with platinum group metals, and a MgO tunnel barrier. These satisfy high temperature endurance (typically 1 min. at...

The influence of cooling rate, temperature, and strain rate on tensile deformation of metallic glasses is investigated using data driven analysis via molecular dynamics simulations. Increasing quenching rate, temperature or strain rate affect activation of shear transformation zones (STZs) and shear banding, causing a brittle-to-ductile transition. A quantitative interpretation for enhanced...

A traditional design alloy is mainly based on a ‘trial-and-error’ process that needs lots of time, effort, and cost. A more effective approach to design alloys using computational models has attracted much attention as computational technologies development. In this work, we applied computational approaches to the design of Ni-based amorphous alloys effectively in order to propose the novel...

When metallic glasses are deformed under a compressive stress state, it is often found that pressure-induced phase transformation under hydrostatic pressure. The relationship between the equivalent stress and stress triaxiality is well described by the Mohr-Coulomb criterion, and the stress triaxiality has a linear relation with the hydrostatic pressure. During cyclic deformation non-uniaxial...

The metal manufacturing sector is responsible of producing huge amounts of solid wastes, most of them containing valuable metals. In some cases, these wastes can be recirculated again in the process, but in most of the cases they are sent to centralized treatment plants. Metallurgical processes used in these centralized plants to valorise metallic wastes and recover valuable metals such as...