Sabbatical Bart Blanpain: Sustainable Metallurgy and Materials in Flanders Metals Valley and beyond

The objective of my sabbatical is to improve my understanding of the technological challenges for making metal production processes more sustainable.I would also like to know better some scientific and technical means of innovation in this domain. Points of attention here are new process metallurgical techniques such as plasma metallurgy and vacuum metallurgy, and supporting modeling techniques (DFT, data analytics, CFD, LCA). For this I want to undertake the following: 1. Visits to the research departments and installations of European and international metallurgical companies with which I and my research group work closely together in the Center for High Temperature Processes (HTC) and the Center for Resource Recovery and Recycling (CR3). In the HTC we work together with the local metallurgical industry of Flanders Metals Valley and in particular Umicore, Metallo, Aperam, Campine and in CR3 with the international metallurgical industry such as Aurubis, Boliden, East Penn and Gopher. 2. Short study visits to European academic groups active in this field, especially MU Leoben (Jurgen Antrekowitz), Lulea Technical University (Caisa Samuelson) and RWTH Aachen (Bernd Friedrich), Helmholtz Freiberg (Markus Reuter) and to European research facilities to explore the possibilities for real-time imaging of metallurgical phenomena with synchrotron radiation and intense neutron sources. 3. Short study visits to the academic groups of Peter Karsmaker, Campus Geel for data analytics and of Geoffroy Hautier (UCL) for DFT. 4. Discussions, brainstorms, study within the own research group.