“Casting is good one day, bad the next. But we haven’t changed anything. The most common complaint from casthouses and inconsistency of grain refiner plays a big part”, John Courtenay, Chairman and CEO, MQP

Studying metallurgy at the University of Aston, John started at Foseco International, working his way through ONC, HNC and LIM, before being seconded to Foseco Canada for three years to work on an exciting new product for steel continuous casting plants, going on hold a number of International marketing and technical positions before joining Foseco Japan as general manager of their steel mills division, returning to Foseco International in 1983.

In 1986, he 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 MQP Limited, which celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2020.

AlCircle: What is MQP’s process to make aluminium alloy production even better and less costly? What are the benefits of Optifine?

John Courtenay: “Casting is good one day, bad the next. But we haven’t changed anything.” This is the most common complaint from casthouses, and inconsistency of grain refiner plays a big part, leading to cracking, inconsistent or large grain size and impairment of melt quality.

We started MQP as we wanted to revolutionise our part of the industry through the development of our high-efficiency Optifine grain refiners, preventing defects in aluminium alloys and bringing addition rates right down to make cost savings for casthouses. Because grain refiners had often been inconsistent in performance, it resulted in significant waste. Still, through intensive innovation, we have changed all this. Today, we have three versions of Optifine with varying potencies for different requirements, which are used to produce over five million tonnes of alloys a year at 45 major casthouses worldwide.

Our most recent development, Optifine 5:1 125, is a game-changer. With 125% relative efficiency, it results from five years of fundamental research into nucleation with BCAST at Brunel University London. It means casthouses need up to 90% less grain refiner, helping them make cost savings while achieving excellent melt quality, especially in alloys with high tensile strength and high surface quality typically used in automotive applications. It is a premium product which gives the end user a high rate of return.

Grain refiner is, arguably, a casthouse’s second biggest spend. By using Optifine instead of a standard grain refiner, customers can save up to three dollars per tonne, resulting in hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in a medium-sized plant.

To make aluminium alloy production as efficient as possible, we ensure our customers have access to stock quickly and easily. We have warehouses worldwide, including a warehouse in Rotterdam to service Europe, and one in Kentucky, where there are many aluminium processing plants, to service North America.

Customers can pick up a pallet at short notice if they need to, and if they want to put in a replacement order a few months before they need the product, we will store it for them until they want it delivered, an extra level of certainty that the stock is there.

AlCircle: What are the ranges of other innovative solutions MQP provides to the aluminium casthouse operations?

John Courtenay: We provide a suite of casthouse solutions to improve the grain refinement part of the manufacturing process, which we have improved on or are improving. For one, we have just improved on our Optifeeder system, our high precision rod feeder that solves the problem of empty despoilers or coils not rotating, and no action being taken or alerts sounded, which can have serious repercussions, including the scrapping of a charge at the last stage of the process and the expense that follows.

We are also in the process of completely automating our Opticast system, the only system in the industry that enables cast houses to test-drive the grain refiners they are using to see if they can improve melt quality and make cost savings. Traditionally, this has been a guessing game and struggling to maintain the same grain size in the melt every time has resulted in scrapped charges, product downgrades and higher processing costs. We have specialists in laboratory equipment associated with the Brunel technology zone giving Opticast an overhaul, and a prototype is launching soon. Casthouses can buy the system themselves, too, not just have us test their grain refiners at our MQP Technology Centre, benefiting those developing new alloys which need to set new grain refiner addition rates.

Completing the package of grain refining solutions is our Optifilter system, an efficient, low hold-up volume filtration process for frequent alloy changes or low-volume operations. The three-chamber system has a ceramic foam filter in the first stage, a TiBAl grain refiner added in the second stage and filtration completed in the third stage using an efficient cyclone. This unit is currently undergoing casthouse trials and, from customer feedback, is drastically reducing the number of inclusions in the melt.

We will promote all these to the industry over the next year to ensure casthouses can tap into a complete package of innovative solutions to improve operational efficiency.

AlCircle: What are the key sectors to which MQP is attached?

John Courtenay: We are increasingly working with major casthouses in the business of producing alloys with high tensile strength - typically higher than 400MPa (UTS) – together with enhanced recyclability, machinability and corrosion resistance. These properties are essential for high-stress components such as extrusion-based crash management systems, body-in-white structural components and battery boxes for electric vehicles.

The challenge for these casthouses is that they increasingly have to add more zirconium to melts to achieve this high tensile strength. Still, through our research at BCAST, we discovered that zirconium has a poisoning effect on grain refiner. Using state-of-the-art electron microscopy, we saw a definite need for an ultra-potent 5:1 grain refiner to overcome the Zr poisoning effect, and Optifine 5:1 125 enables casthouses to successfully cast high-strength zirconium containing 6000 and 7000 alloys for automotive mitigating the zirconium ‘poisoning’ problem, as I recently demonstrated at this year’s TMS.

We also work with casthouses to supply our 100% relative efficiency Optifine 5:1 100 grain refiner for producing foilstock, litho sheet, canstock and packaging and Optifine 3:1 100 for those in the business of general purpose applications and production routes.

AlCircle: How do you foresee the global aluminium industry for 2023?

John Courtenay: Many of the industry challenges of last year appear to have abated. For one, government pressure on China to look at its energy production led to a shortage in raw materials such as magnesium. Still, the major players have managed to rejig their supply chain, and hopefully, these problems will be sorted as we move more into 2023.

AlCircle: Is the global economic and geopolitical crisis, high inflation, energy price and strengthening of USD $ putting a barrier in the growth of the aluminium sector? How is MQP countering these challenges to bypass the impact on the business?

John Courtenay: Optifine is produced at the STNM plant in China, and while the cost of container sea freight was a problem in 2022, container rates from China have dropped back to close to where they were before the pandemic, aiding the recovery in global trade. Our business is benefitting from Optifine being produced in a modern, high-capacity production plant with planned expansions, significant expenditure on R&D, coupled with new product introductions, extensive global stocking facilities, excellent quality control procedures and cost reduction due to efficient, low-cost base manufacture.

AlCircle: Could you share with us MQP’s advancement of sustainable manufacturing with closed-loop production?

John Courtenay: Businesses globally are under pressure to implement sustainability strategies to stay ahead of the compliance curve and drive sustainable change. In terms of end-user behaviour, a recent report revealed that 65% of UK consumers think about the environmental impact of the items they buy, with nearly 80% of US consumers considering sustainability when buying a product.

Making vehicles lighter and creating electrical infrastructure and solar panels, aluminium is a game-changer when it comes to energy transition towards low-carbon energy sources, and we expect demand to grow massively by 2050. But the manufacturing process involves significant amounts of energy, and we strive to combat that.

We are now producing Optifine 5:1 125 with low carbon aluminium, meaning it’s manufactured using hydroelectric power or wind power, which results in far lower polluting CO2 emissions. We aim to convert all our grain refiners, including Optifine 5:1 100 and Optifine 3:100, to this process in the near future.

On top of this, we are recycling customers’ scraps to make our product. This means we take customers’ production scrap aluminium and melt it down to create our grain refiners, as well as master alloys, which they can buy back. Making our grain refiners on a closed-loop recycling basis is very attractive as customers endeavour to improve their practices in a meaningful way that goes towards meeting emissions targets.

In addition, if the world adopted Optifine, fluoride by-products and emissions would be cut by two-thirds. The higher relative efficiency means less energy used, fewer coil changes and transportation around the casthouse and lower warehouse inventory.