Secondary Aluminum In War Production

The term "secondary aluminum" frequently is used loosely and often is considered synonomous with "inferior quality." Under war conditions, when every pound of material must contribute its share to the job at hand, this type of thinking is most unfortunate. Actually, given a supply of segregated scrap, an experienced smelter can produce remelted ingot of good quality, comparing closely to the analysis of the original material, and of considerable value of the war effort. The alloys he can produce are, of course, somewhat controlled by the analysis of the available scrap and, by the very nature of things, some of his production is not suitable for indiscriminate use. However, remelted scrap ingot provided about 273,2 per cent of this country's domestically-produced 1942 aluminum supply and probably will comprise about 39 per cent of the 1943 supply. (Canadian production is excluded from these figures.) That this part of the supply remains important is indicated by a recent report that "requirements" for the second quarter of this year were about 14 per cent greater than the supply, even though that supply will be almost twice the prewar annual production. (And those requirements, incidentally, were prepared after many conservation measures had been taken into account.) Since W. Bonsack recently has published a paper2 on the effects of the various alloying elements and impurities on the properties of aluminum, and such con¬siderations really are the important ones in a discussion of the metallurgy of secondary aluminum, it is planned to restrict this discussion more to a consideration of the sources, general characteristics and possible uses of these materials. For the purpose of this discussion, mill (or run-around) scrap may be disregarded and only plant scrap and obsolete scrap considered. Plant scrap, of course, is that scrap which is generated during the production of some part or assembly from a fabricated form of aluminum, such as sheet, tubing, forgings, castings or the like, and it may consist of solids (including rejected parts or subassemblies) or of machinings. To the extent that the several alloys are effectively segregated and the material is properly identified, the composition after remelting can be rather closely controlled or predicted. Obsolete scrap, on the other hand, is the "junk" which accumulates because of the wearing out or breakage of some piece of equipment. Although it is almost always in the form of solids, the accumulation includes many different alloys (often in the same assembly) and may include a considerable amount of nonaluminum material. The "metallics" recovered from drosses also contribute a portion of this class of material. The composition after remelting, therefore, may vary over rather wide limits and can not be very accurately predicted in any specific instance. SEGREGATION OF PLANT SCRAP Unfortunately, perhaps, it was not very common practice before the war to