Engineering news
Rolled on to baking trays, scrunched over roasting meat or wrapped round yesterday’s leftovers, aluminium foil is used for practically everything.
Once used, however, it is chucked straight away. Although foil is recyclable, it is often contaminated by grease and oils which can damage processing equipment and about 20,000 tonnes are wasted every year in the UK alone.
Faced with the scale of waste on one hand and considering global energy problems on the other, a researcher and a team of engineers repurposed used aluminium to create a very-low emission biofuel. The fuel, dimethyl ether, already powers some cars and can feed turbines to create electricity.
Ahmed Osman, a researcher at the Queen’s University School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering in Belfast, was inspired to create a crystallisation method to obtain an environmentally-friendly and cheap catalyst used in the production of the biofuel.
“One day I took a walk through our laboratories at Queen’s and found lots of aluminium foil waste,” he said. “I did a little digging and after speaking to my colleagues, I ran my experiment and was astonished by the ultrapure single crystals – I didn’t expect it to be 100% pure.”
The crystals were a catalyst for creating dimethyl ether, which is used for cooking and heating as well as in cars and industry. Osman, who told Professional Engineering he also uses his lab-produced fuel to make his tea at home, said the new method is more environmentally-friendly than previous processes, which relied on mined bauxite from West Africa, the West Indies or Australia.
“At Queen’s, our scientists and engineers often work hand in hand on common challenging problems for the society,” said Osman. “By using our joint expertise, we have been able to tackle the issue of sustainable development and come up with a research solution… not only is the alumina more pure than its commercial counterpart, it could also reduce the amount of aluminium foil going to landfill while also sidestepping the environmental damage associated with mining bauxite.”
The alumina’s mechanical, thermal and chemical stability means it can also be used in cutting tools, as an alternative for surgical implants and in the fabrication of electronic devices.
The research was published in Nature Scientific Reports.