By making aluminium production more
efficient, the scientist hope to reduce
Australia's overall energy consumption.
Source: Mark Fergus, CSIRO

Cutting deeply into Australia’s overall energy consumption by changing how a single industry operates sounds ambitious. But even small improvements to the way aluminium is made can save a lot of energy, along with jobs and future investment, as global pressures to cut carbon emissions rise.

Seeking a better way to make aluminium – one of Australia’s biggest industries that last year exported $5 billion worth of metal, directly employed 13,000 people and consumed 14 per cent of all electricity produced in Australia – is the goal of a new research cluster involving five universities in Australia and New Zealand, and CSIRO.

Cluster leader is Geoffrey Brooks, an engineering professor at Swinburne University of Technology, working closely with Dr Neal Wai Poi, aluminium theme leader at CSIRO, and Kathy Dunn from CSIRO’s Flagships Collaboration Fund.

Swinburne’s contribution to the research cluster will be in two of the three research themes, which will study every aspect of making aluminium.

“Essentially, what we’re trying to achieve is a reduction in the amount of energy used in making aluminium, a step which will maintain the industry’s competitiveness,” Professor Brooks says.

“The three themes of research are in the design of the cells (the vessels in which aluminium is made), looking for alternative processes that might provide a breakthrough technology, and improving process control for the current cells.”

Swinburne’s input into the $8 million research project, which has an initial timetable of three years, will be in the fields of novel multistage high-temperature aluminium production (which will have Dr Akbar Rhamdhani as team leader) and in improving process control (to be led by Professor Yos Morsi).

Other universities involved are the University of Auckland, the University of New South Wales, the University of Wollongong and the University of Queensland. Each research group has a CSIRO collaborator.

While ranking as one of Australia’s most important industries, aluminium uses a technology that has not fundamentally changed in the 123 years since it was invented.

An American, Charles Hall, and a Frenchman, Paul Héroult, are credited with almost simultaneously discovering how to dissolve alumina (aluminium oxide extracted from bauxite ore) by high-temperature electrolysis in carbon-lined ‘cells’ containing a bath of chemicals.

The end result is a lightweight metal on which the transport world, especially aviation, has come to depend, but only after earning nicknames such as “congealed electricity”.

Professor Brooks says the overall aim of the new cluster is to develop sustainable, energy-efficient technologies for the aluminium industry.

“We will try to do that by looking for improvements across the aluminium-making process, from the materials used in cells, to the anode rods used in the electrolysis, to process control and regulation.”

When the cluster’s creation was announced in mid-September, CSIRO’s Light Metals Flagship director Dr Raj Rajakumar said that “the collaboration addresses a fundamental need of the aluminium industry. It complements and extends CSIRO’s existing research activities investigating aluminium production technologies with low carbon footprints.”

Professor Brooks says the cluster will focus some of the sharpest minds in Australia and New Zealand on an industry important to both countries. (New Zealand’s Tiwai Point aluminium smelter, near Invercargill, is worth NZ$3.65 billion (A$2.98 billion) to that country’s economy.)

“We are being ambitious with our goals because some of the technologies to be investigated are at the blue-sky end of the spectrum, but they are the kind of things universities and CSIRO ought to be involved in,” he says. 


“There are milestones laid down for each of the projects. Some are just to show the feasibility of a concept, and some will produce a technology worth trying in an aluminium smelter.

 “Other fields of research are into what I call ‘bulldozer technologies’, which are going into completely new fields and the best you can hope for after three years is to say here’s a feasible idea and see if industry is interested investing in it.”

Professor Brooks says it is possible to see the Hall–Héroult process undergoing revolutionary change, with the very heart of what occurs in the metal-making cell a case study.

“The way Hall–Héroult is currently set up, you can’t get the anode and cathode close together, which means a lot of heat is wasted because you’re trying to drive a lot of current through something that is resisting current.

“That heat has to be dissipated, and that means about 50 per cent of all the energy going into making aluminium is lost as waste heat.

“When you think that 14 per cent of all electricity produced in Australia is used to make aluminium, then you get an idea of the potential benefit to the country from any improvements we can make just by improving cell design,” Professor Brooks says.

The field of research to be undertaken by Dr Rhamdhani and Professor Brooks at Swinburne will involve a fresh approach to the chemistry of aluminium production using computational thermodynamics.

“Computational thermodynamics allows you to look at many complex reactions, very quickly, using high-speed computers,” Professor Brooks says. “We’re going to be using that approach to try to evaluate the new chemistry for making aluminium.

“That is one of the bulldozer technologies, following the high-temperature route to aluminium. The other bulldozer technology is to try to use low-temperature electrolytes, which our colleagues at the University of NSW are investigating.”

At the core of the multiple research work being undertaken across Australia and New Zealand is the aim of achieving greater sustainability.

“Engaging with industry will be important to the cluster,” Professor Brooks says. “We hope that the cluster will ultimately develop into an ongoing consortium that will service and support the aluminium industry.”