Aussie metal mastery may make magnificent machines

Australian scientists are winners in the race to master new magnesium technology to build the motor vehicles and consumer goods of the future.

This follows breakthroughs by CSIRO that make it possible for manufacturers to successfully use magnesium for a host of everyday products from motor vehicle engines and body panels, to printers, mobile phones, DVDs, trains, batteries and even bicycles.

Magnesium is attractive for its strength, light weight and recyclability, and the race has been on for more than a decade to be the first to develop new low-cost technologies to make magnesium manufacturing friendly.

CSIRO's Elaborately Transformed Metals group and its scientists, Dr Colleen Bettles and Dr Daniel Liang, have helped to develop, respectively, a new alloy for the next generation motor vehicles engines and low-cost thin magnesium sheet ready for production lines worldwide.

Dr Bettles, in collaboration with Australian Magnesium Corporation (AMC), led a team within the Cooperative Research Centre for CAST Metals Manufacturing that has developed AMC-SC1. This is a new magnesium alloy, which has already been cast into an engine block designed by AVL List, a leading European engine design company.

Dr Bettles says, "The new 14 kg engine is a three-cylinder diesel (diesel because this fuel demands higher performance than petrol engines) which is more than 33% lighter than existing lightweight aluminium engines and about 75% lighter than cast iron.

"Magnesium alloy engine blocks will be featherweights compared with the cast iron that ruled for most of the 20th century and which is still used for the majority of internal combustion engines."

"While they answer the demand for better performance, they also offer lighter vehicles which use less fuel and have reduced emissions", says Dr Bettles.

Meanwhile, CSIRO's Dr Daniel Liang leads the team that is now producing the world's first near production-ready low-cost magnesium sheet.

"This means many car parts, such as body panels, seat profiles, doors, anti-intrusion bars, bonnets, boots and bumper bars, can now all be made from a magnesium product which is affordable for manufacturers", says Dr Liang. "The magnesium car is now possible.

CSIRO has built an industrial-scale pilot plant to produce the low-cost magnesium sheet.</>

Item provided courtesy of The CSIRO