This course will cover the removal of hydrogen, alkalis, and inclusions from molten aluminum alloys during ingot casting. It will include both the theory and the practice of furnace treatment, in-line degassing, filtration, and other processes that are used to improve metal quality. The impacts of the various impurities on metal quality and methods of measuring impurities will be discussed. Several vendors of metal treatment equipment will summarize their technologies to provide an overview of the equipment that is available.
Operating, engineering, management, and research personnel involved in aluminum ingot casting.
The following topics will be covered:
Corleen Chesonis is currently a consultant in aluminum metal treatment and molten metal quality with Metal Quality Solutions LLC. She has a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Pittsburgh. Chesonis has over 35 years of experience in the aluminum industry with Alcoa, including 20 years working in the area of metal treatment and molten metal quality at the Alcoa Technical Center. She has published 15 papers in this field and has served as a session chair at multiple TMS meetings. Chesonis also served as subject chair for the Cast Shop Symposium at the TMS 2004 Annual Meeting & Exhibition.
Edward Williams is currently the Manager of Melting and Recycling at the Arconic Technology Center. He began his career at Reynolds Aluminum in the recycling and reclamation group in 1989 as an engineering co-op. After graduating, he worked as a research engineer in the Reynolds Casthouse R&D organization until 2000, when he transferred to Ingot Technology at the Alcoa Technical Center (ATC) with the merger of the two companies. With Alcoa, Williams has worked at both ATC as a research engineer and as production plant engineer at Alcoa’s Warrick Operations. With the company split, Williams has gone with the Arconic downstream focused organization, supporting casthouse operations. Over his career, he has worked in a large variety of roles in casthouse research and plant support, including molten metal treatment, aluminum melting furnace efficiency, scrap recycling, CFD modeling of molten aluminum processes, continuous casting, Al-Li ingot casting, and ingot plant capital engineering as well as R&D management. He has served TMS as a Cast Shop session chair twice, as the Cast Shop subject chair in 2014, and Light Metals editor in 2016. He earned the Light Metals Award from TMS in 2001. Williams has his B.S. and M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Virginia Tech.
Leonard S. Aubrey received his Bachelor’s of Science Degree in Metallurgy from Case Western Reserve University 1976. From 1976 to 1982 he was Assistant Technical and Research Director at the Steel Founder’s Society of America where he directed research programs related to steel processing. In 1984 he received a Masters Degree in Metallurgy from Case Western Reserve University where his thesis subject was on the filtration of high temperature alloys. Since 1984, he has been with SELEE Corporation where he has held the positions of Research Metallurgist, Applications Engineer, and Vice President - Applications Engineering. Areas of expertise cover filter material development and filtration of steel, stainless steels, vacuum nickel-base super alloys and aluminum alloys.