Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

Canada is a major aluminum producer in the world and exports a great amount of primary aluminum metal.Transforming a significant amount of this exported primary metal into value-added final products would inject a major drive to national and regional economy. Aluminum production and transformation represent a key industry sector, particularly in Québec. With the rapid emergence of other countries in both aluminum production and transformation, there is a pressing need for Canada to come up with innovative transformation processes and value-added products. A synergy between universities and industries concerning the research, development and application of innovative aluminum transformation technologies is an essential avenue for achieving this goal. UQAC's long-term development on aluminum metallurgy, combined with strong support of industrial partners, constitutes a sound basis to continue supporting the research activities in aluminum transformation for many years to come. After extensive consulting with industrial partners, the proposed program focuses on four areas of research: 1) improvement of product quality and performance in the sheet ingot metallurgy; 2) hot deformation and high temperature phase transformation of aluminum alloys; 3) solidification and casting processes of valued-added products; 4) advanced aluminum materials and processing. In each research area, a number of well-defined projects are selected based on the industry-driven priority. Collaborated with several professors and industrial scientists and experts, the research team has a wide range of the interdisciplinary expertise to support all research projects. The long-term objectives of the proposed program are: i) to advance the knowledge of aluminum metallurgy and its emerging transformation technologies, and ii) to train highly qualified metallurgists and material engineers for Canadian aluminum and its related industries.