Sharun Hegdes literature review seminar.
Sharun Hegdes literature review seminar
The first steps towards a fossil-free steel value chain have already been taken and this research supports the next logical step. It concerns multiple loop steel recycling and requires a holistic approach for the whole life cycle of steel products and the entire value chain. Steel is one of the most recycled commodities in the world. However, most of what is today termed recycling constitutes downcycling – i.e., that the recycled products exhibit significantly poorer quality than the original products. The main goal of this project is to identify and develop methods to avoid downcycling.
Steel scrap is not a uniform material but a very diverse group of materials with widely different constituents and properties. In the short term, improved recycling may come from innovations with respect to sorting and characterization of scrap so that every steel class can be recycled as itself. After multiple recycling loops, unwanted elements can accumulate and influence microstructures and properties in ways that have not been researched. In a longer perspective the diversity and complexity of steel alloys should be reduced by decreasing the number of alloying elements in steel. This would require completely new approaches to alloy design based on microstructure rather than alloying additives. The doctoral studies in this project will support these ambitions and focus the development of strategies to keep the steel quality intact even after multiple product life cycles.
This project is a collaboration between LTU and the Wallenberg Initiative Materials Science for Sustainability (WISE), funded by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation. WISE is the largest investment in materials science ever made in Sweden and includes major investments at the leading universities in Sweden. The vision is a sustainable future through materials science
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