In conversation with John Courtenay, Chairman of MQP & CEO of MQP International Ltd and co-director of ACT,  who has highlighted the innovations they have adopted to transform casthouse operations in our e-Magazine ‘Aluminium LeaderSpeak 2025’. He also noted that China and the United States were the highest adopters of their technologies for the aerospace, automotive, and beverage cans industries. In 1986, Mr Courtenay switched from steel to aluminium, starting a long association with aluminium casthouse technology as director of technology and marketing of Foseco Aluminium. After selling this business to Pyotek, he used his experience to form ACT, a family firm celebrating its 10th anniversary in 2026.

Here is an excerpt of his interview with us.

AL Circle: ACT products are used by major casthouse groups and independent smelters worldwide, contributing to the production of over three million tonnes of aluminium alloys, annually. What quantifiable improvements in furnace operations, mechanical properties, and casting yield have these casthouses reported since adopting your products? 

John Courtenay: Through our products, from our Refinal and Refinex fluxes to our Casiflux launder coatings, we have been revolutionising our part of the industry, reducing waste and poor-quality material and ensuring better quality finished products across the board.

In terms of quantifiable improvements, our BatchPilot system is having a huge impact. This pioneering piece of equipment was developed as a result of our identifying the problems that cast houses had been having due to their inability to accurately measure furnace weights. The system works on the principle of accurately measuring the change in pressure in the furnace hydraulic cylinder as it tilts the furnace to cast. We had a brainwave to engage a professor of mathematics at Chicoutimi university, who had made some early studies on feasibility and a project was initiated. 

The practical work showed that the pressure change in the hydraulic cylinder could be precisely correlated with the change of weight in the furnace. However, a key requirement to achieve the required level of accuracy was that the pressure measurements had to be performed dynamically, that is, while the furnace was moving. This led us to establish the practice that to make a furnace heel weight measurement, the furnace had to be tilted two times with a cylinder displacement of 100mm at an ultra-low tilt speed. 

This small movement would be enough to make highly accurate measurements, meaning casthouses would know the exact weight of the liquid metal heel in the furnace to +/- 250kg. 

In 2006, the first BatchPilot units were installed successfully at Aleris Duffel in the Netherlands and are in daily use today. In 2008, a project was initiated to optimise the number and sizes of slabs produced in order to increase production capacity at Alunorf in Germany, where the most serious issue was the number of short casts being produced – 600 per month out of 1,500. Operators had to rely on a visual assessment of the weight of the furnace, which gave an error of >+/- 2 tonnes.

The furnace size at casting pit 11, where the BatchPilot was to be installed, was a nominal 45t, and the casting table was designed to cast 3 x 15t slabs. In an ideal world, this would work perfectly, but because of problems with inaccurate estimation of the heel weight - the weight of metal left in the furnace after casting, typically 1-5t - the final furnace weight was frequently insufficient to cast three full-length slabs. In this case, the slabs would have to be scrapped.

To avoid this, they frequently cast with only two slabs, therefore wasting valuable production. Alunorf went on to install 11 BatchPilots, one for each casting pit, ensuring that there was no production lost, resulting in a significant increase in production and the incidence of short slabs was reduced to below 1%.  

This innovation has transformed casthouse operations. A huge benefit is the increased productivity that can be achieved in the furnace operation due to the increase in ‘right first time’ batching. In a typical casthouse, the furnace cycle time is four hours. However, you can lose several hours making analysis corrections because of the inaccurate batching due to the inaccurate heel weight, and this results in the loss of an average of 15 to 20 hours a week, equivalent to two or three charges per week. 

The added value created by converting aluminium scrap into billets is reflected in the billet premium, which is currently $220 a tonne. With an average charge size of 50 tonnes, the value per charge is $11,000. If three charges are ‘lost in a week’, this is a loss of income of 4 x 3 x $11000 = $132,000 per month. With the average cost of a BatchPilot installation being $120,000, customers, when asked, say the BatchPilot pays for itself in 2-3 months. Looking at this another way, results show that casthouses can achieve up to a 17% increase in production capacity by investing in the BatchPilot.

AL Circle: Given the increasing global demand for high-purity aluminium, how has ACT’s customer base evolved over the past five years? Could you provide insights into the geographical regions or specific market segments (e.g., aerospace, automotive, beverage cans) that have shown the highest adoption of your technologies?

John Courtenay: From the outset, ACT has targeted critical, quality, and high-value segments such as aerospace, automotive, and beverage cans because we believe that our technologies will be of greater benefit to the end user in these applications. Initially, we thought that the greatest value would have been in aerospace, but because the quality requirements are so high, the qualification regime for the adoption of new products/technologies is necessarily very strict and involves lengthy and costly testing and approval processes. The net result so far has been that major customers have not been prepared to go through these processes and the result is that we have not been able to progress. On the other hand, we continue to focus on the other quality, critical, high-value segments, particularly automotive, and due to the increase in demand for high-purity aluminium, our target market segments are expanding. 

With respect to geographical regions, we saw the USA as a large potential market for us, but when President Trump introduced punitive tariffs on products from China, this put us at a competitive disadvantage. This process continued under President Biden and has deteriorated further in President Trump’s second term. 

Our manufacturing strategy for our Refinal range of high-performance, environmentally friendly fluxes started with European manufacture, but as environmental requirements placed on manufacturing became more stringent, resulting in ever higher costs, we moved manufacture to the Far East, starting with India. 

In 2019, we moved manufacturing to China, where we are now achieving competitive costs together with high and, most importantly, consistent product quality. These decisions have led us to turn our focus away from North America to other regions of the world, such as Brazil, South America, and the Far East, where we can grow unhindered by governmental action. This experience supports the view expressed by Ken Fisher that “….as a good rule, tariffs routinely hurt the imposer more than those imposed upon.”

To read the full interview, click here