Effect of Compaction and Thermal De-coating Pre-treatments on the Recyclability of Coated and Uncoated Aluminium

Scrap pre-treatments, such as compaction and thermal de-coating, are standard industrial practices for recycling aluminium post-consumer scrap. This study compares the recyclability of a coated and uncoated 8111 alloy under the application of compaction and/or thermal de-coating pre-treatments. Sheets of 600 μm thickness were shredded into chips and compacted by uniaxial pressure, moderate pressure torsion (MPT), or MPT at 450 °C (Hot MPT) into briquettes of 4 cm diameter. A subset of briquettes and loose chips was subsequently heat-treated for 1 h at 550 °C, while the other set was left untreated. The effectiveness of the heat treatment for the different compaction methods was examined by mass balance and the internal porosity of the briquettes by computed tomography. Re-melting the samples under molten salt-flux showed that the coalescence of the coated material significantly improves with the thermal de-coating pre-treatment, especially for the loose chips and briquettes compacted uniaxially. Lower coalescences were obtained for the de-coated MPT briquettes, as a result of an incomplete de-coating.