Strategies for aluminum recycling : insights from material system optimization

The dramatic increase in aluminum consumption over the past decades necessitates a societal effort to recycle and reuse these materials to promote true sustainability and energy savings in aluminum production. However, the path towards this goal is full of challenges which lead to inefficiencies in the usage of secondary materials. These frictions are due to (i) rapidly changing consumption patterns, (ii) compositional incompatibility in scrap streams and (iii) incomplete information in the decision making process around scrap consumption. This thesis tackles these inefficiencies by developing optimization-based decision tools and modeling techniques for the assessment of sorting technologies and scrap management from procurement to production. In the course of managing and accounting for the aforementioned variability and uncertainties in the material system inputs, the goal is to present cost-effective strategies to increase scrap consumption under applicable context of different operating environment in aluminum production. These decision tools also aim to foster a fundamental shift in decision-making behavior to factor in uncertainties into the scrap management process.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Materials Science and Engineering.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2005

Author dc:creator

• Li, Preston Pui-Chuen

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Randolph E. Kirchain, Jr. and Lionel C. Kimerling.

• Materials Science and Engineering.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/33611

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/33611