Messe Düsseldorf, Germany, is the place to be November 29 – December 1, 2016, if you are involved in the B2B aluminum industry. The ALUMINIUM 2016 show will be focused on six main exhibitions: automotive, building and construction, aerospace and aeronautics, engineering, transportation, and packaging.
According to the show website, automotive is the most important market for aluminum….
The mega-trend towards lightweight construction in automobiles has resulted in excellent growth potential for the use of aluminium in cars. Effective lightweight construction in vehicles already inevitably involves aluminium – and use levels are still rising considerably.
Aluminium is being used more and more in volume vehicles – in motors, in the bodywork, in structural members and in the chassis.
This trend is impressively reflected in the figures, with the average proportion of aluminium per car growing steadily. 60 years ago, an average of 19 kilograms of aluminium were used per vehicle; between 1990 and 2013 this percentage almost tripled from 50 kg to 140 kg. By 2020, it will increase to between 160 and 180 kg as small and medium-sized cars follow the trend of the luxury class with regard to the use of aluminium.
We wrote about the trend of aluminum alloys driving the PMI programs in automotive manufacturing this past summer in the article, The Lighter Side of the Automotive Industry. Aluminium is used in the automotive industry to reduce the weight of the vehicle and is typically alloyed with magnesium, manganese, and other elements to improve the components’ physical and chemical properties. In the article we also discussed how in order to reduce the weight of components even further, aluminum is being alloyed with other elements. To ensure quality, however, the automobile manufacturers need to know which characteristics are most important and what requirements need to be met. Some characteristics to consider are moderate-to-high strength, non-heat-treatable, readily weldable and excellent resistance to corrosion.
Those minor differences can be catastrophic differences if the lack of appropriate elements, or a different composition of elements, is critical to the structural integrity of the vehicles, and the safety of its passengers.
We will be in Hall 9, Booth 9123, discussing why manufacturers who supply or use aluminium in their products must take on the responsibility of knowing what’s in their incoming raw materials as well as their outgoing products. These are the reasons that we will be demonstrating portable x-ray fluorescence analyzers, which have become so important to the aluminium and automotive industries. The metal composition can be verified at delivery, on the production line, or at finished product inspection points.
In addition, another crucial element involving aluminum in the automotive industry is the thickness of the metal itself. The auto industry requires precise, real-time measurements that meet the tightest specifications while maximizing raw material use. Coating weight and thickness gauges, as well as profile gauges, are utilized to ensure quality requirements are met.
If you stop by our booth, ask us to explain how you can streamline your workflow by completing rapid elemental analysis of solid metallic samples with optical emission spectrometry.
If you can’t be at the show, take a look at this Aluminium 2016 Event page to learn more about the products you’ll miss. You can also follow the show twitter feed by using #ALU2016. (They recently offered a free code on their feed.)
ALUMINIUM @ALUMINIUM_SHOW Nov 7
You always wanted to visit #ALU2016? Take this free code co6q-vadg-97gq-63h9 and register: http://bit.ly/VisitALU2016
If you do get to go to Dusseldorf, the show website offers several sights for you to visit, ranging from promenades to piazzas, from oldest monuments to the longest bar in the world, and from architecture styles that range from neo-Renaissance to Art Nouveau. It is a cultural and educational center, with most landmarks pre-dating the modern smelting process that has made aluminium available to us today.
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Aluminium is widely used in the automotive industry to reduce the weight of the car as well as making it more resistant to corrosion. As a result, cars are able to weigh a fraction of what they did a few years ago and are built with greater resilience to rust and corrosion. Although aluminium has many advantages, it does have some disadvantages as well. These come from both an environmental standpoint and from a cost perspective – specifically, the fact that aluminium is expensive to produce and so the manufacturing process itself can be quite expensive, leading to higher costs for consumers.