National Lab Discovery Series: Advanced Metal Upcycling with ShAPE™

Hello everyone, and thank you for joining us today. My name is Darrell Herling from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and I am your host for this Department of Energy National Laboratory Discovery Series webinar. Today we'll be exploring shear-assisted processing and extrusion, or SHAPE, developed at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. In addition to hosting, we'll also share insights on partnership opportunities with PNNL for SHAPE and other advanced materials manufacturing technologies. We are privileged to have Dr. Scott Whalen who will share his expert perspectives on this technology as well as Ms. Sarah Hunt who will also be taking a few minutes later to discuss how business and how other organizations can partner with PNNL through technology licensing. But first, let me provide an introduction to Dr. Whalen. Our speaker, Scott Whalen, is a chief scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. where he also leads the thermochemical processing team. Scott's research focus on developing the shape technology for aluminum and titanium recycling, as well as thermoelectric materials, and advancing science of shape on projects supported by Department of Energy, Department of War, And private industry. His work has earned him recognition as PNNL's Engineer of the Year and Inventor of the Year, being named Battelle's distinguished inventor and most recently being selected as Department of Energy's Innovator of the Year. He also serves as an Invention Ambassador for the National Academies of Inventors, where he shares his passion for Innovation with students of all ages. Scott has authored over 40 peer-reviewed journal articles related to shape, holds 23 granted U.S. patents, and has received two R&D 100 awards for this technology. He earned his bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Idaho, master's in biomechanics from Texas A&M, and doctorate in mechanical engineering from Washington State University. He then completed a postdoc appointment at Sandia National Laboratories working on microelectromechanical systems. Fun fact, Scott recently solved Rubik's Cube in just 19 minutes and 62 seconds. Please join me in welcoming Scott Whalen. But before we proceed, I'd like to remind you that your microphones will be muted throughout this presentation. If you have any questions, please type them into the Q&A question and answer tool in your Teams app. It's either at the top or bottom of your screen, depending on your system. We will address your questions during the Q&A session at the end of this webinar. Now, let's dive into the fascinating world of shear-assisted processing extrusion. Scott? Thank you for the introduction, Daryl. I'm going to defend my honor on the Rubik's Cube, though. It was actually 19.62 seconds, just for clarification. My apologies, Scott. That's much more impressive. I understand. Yeah, thanks. So thank you all for taking the time out of your day to join today and giving your hour to hopefully learn something new and exciting with the shape technology here. So we'll try and make it fun and interesting for you. So I will go ahead and get started. So with the shape technology we recognize this as a new technology platform where we're doing our best to transform the way metals are manufactured at the at the highest level. So we'll go into some overview of that and also some specific technical details. So I wanted to share a little bit about the shape team. So the first team is my family. That's actually a picture of my family in my lab that my son in the center there uploaded to Mark Rober's Crunch Lab satellite that was sent up by SpaceX a while ago. And we were sitting in church this Sunday. He said, hey, dad, my picture's up. Check this out. I thought, that's perfect because it's got, you know, this is when I brought my family to the lab and it's got the shape machine in the background. And we have a staff member here who's pretty passionate about trying to get Recycling into space using the shape technology. So if we're not all the way there yet, maybe a picture of it in space is the the next next thing As far as the actual team goes, this picture is a little dated, but we have about 30 plus scientists and engineers from all across the laboratory who work on the shape technology. All combined would be full-time on the technology. It's a really diverse team from all of our different what we call directors across the lab, and just a really exciting team to be part of. I was out at the lab. About a year ago, standing around at a project meeting, and all eight of us there were from all different countries, and it was just a really fun environment to work in. We've got a great, brilliant, and smart team working on this technology. So here at PNNL, we, in the laboratory, do what is called solid-phase processing. Some people call it solid-state processing. They're synonymous. And what we do out there is we study the effects of really extreme deformation during the synthesis of metals, the making of them, or the processing of the metals after the fact. And this diagram here is an effort to show what goes on. Where on the panel facing us on this bar, this shows... The grain size of the material getting refined as we deform it more, going from left to right. The top of this panel would indicate impurities that are agglomerated or large chunks that get refined and dispersed throughout the matrix of metal as it goes from left to right. And then into the page would be our ability to modify our conditions during the processes to align the texture in certain ways, to keep them from being random and orient them in a way that might be advantageous for a certain metal. And so when we discover something that we really like and has good properties and some advantages, we then develop manufacturing solutions where we try and realize these fantastic material properties in something that is a scale that would be of interest to industry. So we do this out in what's called our Applied Engineering Lab, where we have all of our large solid-phase processing equipment out there. Some of our specialties that we spend a lot of time on are friction stir joining and something called hive joining. You can look that up. It's a really interesting new technology for joining dissimilar materials. We do friction stir additive manufacturing and cold spray deposition and quite a bit of what we're here to talk about today, which is shear-assisted processing and extrusion. So today's topics, I'll be talking a little bit about the origin of shape, how it came about, the capabilities we have here at PNNL, and I was asked to give a specific treatment to the work that we're doing on aluminum upcycling using this technology. Back since the Roman times, lead pipes were all made the same way, where they would melt the metal, cast it into thin sheets in a box, roll it around a wood mandrel like a tree, and then pour lead or solder over it to heal the seam. And it wasn't until a couple thousand years later when Joseph Brahma, right at the late 1700s, developed a hand crank press where he was able to demonstrate heating up of lead and smushing it through a die. In a direct extrusion configuration, just like I show in the diagram down below. So that was kind of the first change in, you know, a couple thousand years. And then Thomas Burr, just a few years later, adapted that for the hydraulic press. That's pretty much is how extrusion was done, you know, for all intents and purposes for the next 170 years until Thomas and Nicholas at the Welding Institute had this idea to rotate the piece of material as it was getting shoved through the die. And this is an article that I have from their internal magazine archives showing How how they did this. And so they they mentioned this in a couple couple conference papers. There was never really any data presented. It was more along the lines of, hey, here's this, you know, interesting new idea. And then it wasn't until nine years after that that the first peer reviewed journal popped up by Anthony Reynolds and his student, W. Tang, where they took aluminum A 2000 series machining chips, ran them through a similar process, a little bit different than what TWI reported, and to make these wires to show aluminum recycling. And Tony was a joint appointee with PNNL for quite some time. And so I asked him, I said, Tony, how did you like, why did you decide to do this? And this is actually a really good example. He said it was just a question of deciding to give it a try because it looked cool. And I saw certain applications that might be of value. That was neat. That's a good example to all of us. And so how did this, so how did our involvement come about here at PNNL? So back in 2013, we had two staff members, Vineet Joshi and Kurt Lavender, who were working on this friction extrusion approach of making wires to modify the orientation of the crystal planes in magnesium. And they did an experiment with a hole they were putting it through got too big and they ended up pushing up material that got plugged and inadvertently creating a really poorly formed tube. And Kurt had spent time in the extrusion industry and said, wait a second, let's intentionally put a mandrel in there while we're doing this to make a hollow structure. And so they did this. And this is an image of the very first magnesium tubes that were made. during or using this process and so i just want to be a little bit clear about some nomenclature here that the term friction extrusion is used in the peer-reviewed literature that is always applied to something like a wire rod something that's a hollow profile we use the term shape to describe things that are hollow profiles be it circular squares asymmetric multi-cell profiles we call And we have what's called shape machinery to execute that. So sometimes this all gets blurred together. And I apologize that if that happens in this presentation, but I recognize that friction extrusion has, you know, it was something that was going on before we got involved. We do it too, but we acknowledge that it existed. So how does shape work? So in this diagram on the right-hand side, What we do is combine a linear and rotational shear at the exact same time to impart an extreme amount of deformation into the leading edge of the material while it's feeding through the extrusion die. And so you can see it out in the diagram here in the upper right in the area that's highlighted in orange. That's where all the action's going on. And I put this picture in here just to give an example. And this is some work done by Nicole Overman here at the lab. Where she was looking at alloying copper-nickel powders. And so you can see here, the green is the copper powders on the right-hand side that's kind of been smooshed together, and the nickel has been deformed a little bit. And you can see it erupting as it's being processed from the left into these really just gorgeous vortices of these nano-laminates. And over the course of a couple hundred microns in a split second, because of the extreme pressure, temperature, deformation, it goes from... powders to a fully copper nickel alloy, not just copper nickel that are friends, but a fully alloyed material. And so with that ability, there are a lot of potential advantages. So refinement and homogenization of the structure, rapid diffusion, it's versatile to feedstock inputs like powders, chips, castings, flakes, various form factors can result in improved properties. These can be structural properties like mechanical properties. or functional properties like conductivity or corrosion resistance. Thank There are also processes efficiencies and advantages that can happen where manufacturing steps can get skipped or perhaps heat treatments that can be reduced or eliminated. And one of the nice things about the technology is unlike many other severe plastic deformation techniques, this technique can actually be realized at a bulk scale. you. And, of course, done in an indirect or direct extrusion approach, if those terms mean something to you as an extruder. Here, this is an example I have. This is a demo that we run in the lab frequently when visitors come. This is a one-inch diameter aluminum tube that's made using the shape process that's thin-walled, and you can see it coming out. It's coming out at a somewhat industry-relevant speed of about 15, 16 meters a minute. Just as an example, so you can see it getting processed and coming on out there. There's not much interesting to see inside where it's going on because the container is rotating, but that is the actual tube coming out of the machine. I want to give a sense for the technology breadth here too as well. So we process all sorts of materials across many different sectors. So I would consider what I would say the easy to process materials like aluminum, magnesium and copper, kind of lower temperature. And then higher temperature materials like titanium, it's actually fairly straightforward to process and then more difficult with steels and nickel. And we work across a broad suite of sectors as well, from automotive and aerospace to building and construction, power grid, nuclear, consumer electronics, and defense and war applications as well. And just to give you a sense, last year in FY26, we had 34 different projects across this space with 11 different project managers. So a lot of work, a lot of work going on. So if you ask me a question at the end and I don't know the answer, there's a lot going on at the lab here in this space. We have about 65 peer-reviewed publications in this area of shape. About 60 of those have been published since 2020. So fairly modern work. One of the things that we're fortunate to have to have here at the lab is some really world-class purpose-built machinery. Our first machine came to us in 2017. That was an internally funded Thank program that brought that machine in from Bond Technologies. In 2024, we procured with the assistance of our Washington State Department of Commerce. And the CMEI MMTO office, this larger scale shape machine where we could demonstrate things you. that are a little more relevant to industry scale. And then in 2025, this amazing machine here that actually has the ability, we call it the shape shifter, to transition from horizontal to vertical, which is specifically built for direct extrusion and actually doing work on semiconductors. Bond has been a fantastic partner in this effort that we've, that we, this road we've gone down and just makes fantastic, fantastic, reliable machines for us. We've also developed technology, this number four here, we call it that a retrofit, where the goal there is to retrofit existing conventional extrusion presses to add the rotating component to have the. Potential for not having to clean sheet design a large scale shape machine to be able to adapt existing infrastructure. Number five, there is a rad capable machine that's on its way. And number six is actually another shape machine with environmental controls so that we can more effectively process sensitive materials like magnets and titanium and things like that. And we also have a pilot scale machine that is currently being planned. And that would be very exciting when that comes to the lab. So we benefit from, from some really amazing machinery. Um, and from that able to make some really good products but that wasn't always the case so i thought i thought i would show you some of the early days and so this is a picture of some pretty typical tooling a number of years ago where we have a die on the left and a container with the material in it on the right and this is an example of what happens when you don't get the tolerancing quite right and the die friction welds to the inside of the container we've ripped apart plenty of tools we've got that all worked out now but that was something that we they worked through um This image in the upper left, this is actually the first large scale magnesium tube that we made, which looks a lot more like magnesium wool. That was run number one. Run number seven, we got to the point of making magnesium ribbons. And run number 12 was what we call the McTwist. And eventually, of course, we got to something that looks like a fantastic tube. But that was part of the process. In the lower left here, this is the very first run we made on some semiconductor materials we work with. Center bottom is our first attempt at extruding aluminum chips. And you probably can't tell, but the lower right is the first attempt at making a copper composite ultraconductor. On the left is our first metal matrix composite. Thank The center is an aluminum tube that literally blew out at the weld seams. And my personal favorite, this is actually our first square magnesium tube that was made that ended up looking a lot more like a jellyfish, which I was proud of because it ended up getting second place in PNNL's Sciences Art Contest that year. you. So fast forward to present days we've solved most if not all of those issues and now we're at the point where we're able to make really really high quality products you see very long spools hundreds of meters of ultra conductors for the for the power grid industry really high quality tubing and extrusions shown on the bottom and large long parts shown on the top here as well. In contrast, these are some images from some very modern work in the peer-reviewed literature, and this is not a knock at all. This is really good scientific work that is done, but others are challenged by the lack of really state-of-the-art equipment to be able to execute the process. Again, there's really good science being done, but it's hard when the machinery is not quite as... advanced and complex. And so we do benefit from that. And we learn a lot from these articles, too. Lots of good science. This is an image of a really specialized machine that we have here. Again, our shape shifter one, specifically designed for Direct extrusion with IP going clear back to 2023 in this case. But I've got a video here showing how these two crossheads that you see in that image work together to do direct extrusion. So I'll play the video and you'll see the container with the material rotating on its own crosshead. And then as we pan back, you'll see the actual ram stem rotating along with it as it pushes the material through a die that's completely stationary. And this was a really important development because direct extrusion is the most commercially prevalent method of making components. So another. Another example of, I guess, kind of the technological sophistication I want to point out is this is a really fun project that we are participating on with University of Michigan. University of Michigan is the lead PNNL supporting along with Hydro and Padnos and Ford. This is funded through CMEI, the Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Technologies Office. And the goal of this project is to look at reclaiming end of life vehicle scrap. And converting that into automotive components. So the goal here is to develop this component called a roof rail. It's a really critical structural component in an F-150. And so one of the things we need to prove is you saw all those pictures of... That's a really high quality high strength extrusion alloy that's used in the auto m ot ive industry and So we fabricated those, sent them to Ford, us. and Ford then, in their Dearborn Rogue River complex, manufactured those on their real production equipment into F-150 roof rails. And you can see our Secretary of Energy, Chris Wright, and Assistant Secretary Audrey Robertson enjoying learning about these parts that Ford manufactured as part of this project. I'll mention a little later where we are going next with this, too. Okay, so on to the topic of aluminum recycling I was asked to talk about. So aluminum is a critical material. You might not think of it that way, but it really is. If you see the chart on the left, this is the USGS list of critical materials. You can see aluminum highlighted there at number 15. It's just out of the category of high. So it's very high on the elevated level of importance by impact on GDP. For the Department of Energy, there's this chart that's organized by importance to energy. You can see where aluminum falls on the quadrant system here of importance to energy and supply risk. So not quite all the way in the upper diagram or upper quadrant, but still important. And then this is a recent report by NATO that organized materials by supply risk for allied defense. And you can see aluminum and graphite are actually in the black dash box that I have there. Categorized as very high. So when you do a Venn diagram around these, you know, these three sources, aluminum is pretty important. So aluminum is definitely a critical material. On the downside, here's a plot that shows what has gone on with the U.S.'s production of primary aluminum over the years. So in 1980-ish, the United States supplied about 30% of the world's supply of primary aluminum. That has dropped down to about 1% of the world's supply, going from about 4.5 million metric tons a year down to about 700 thousand metric tons. And then looking at where we import now as a result of that, so the United States makes about 15% of our own primary aluminum, and most of it comes from Canada, and then a smattering of different countries that it comes from around the world. So there's definitely supply chain risks there as well and so... So when those products meet the end of life, where do they go? And so the United States exports about 2.2 million metric tons of aluminum scrap, mostly to India, China, Korea, Malaysia, and the rest of Southeast Asia is primarily where it goes. I A large amount of that is automotive scrap called Zorba, don't about a million metric tons or so. These are hard numbers to get at such a global scale, but that's about what it is. And the Aluminum Association put a recent report out citing that about 250 million pounds of used beverage cans are exported overseas as well. know. So the automotive Zorba gets sorted primarily, not exclusively, primarily into a product called... which is a more pure form of that that is more of the light fraction of it you know more tending towards aluminum and magnesium and things like that. So the thought here is, well, let's utilize this stuff. Could the shape process be made to utilize this? Because if you can, there could be a real economic benefit. So in the extrusion industry, roughly something like 60% of the cost of a part is attributed to the cost of the feedstock itself. So it's kind of like a commodity-driven industry. Not totally, but kind of. And so with primary aluminum now being about $2.30 a pound. UBCs being about $1.15 and Twitch about $1.40. Roughly about a dollar a pound reduction compared to primary could reduce the part cost by 25% or 30%. That's huge for a commodity. So this could have a huge impact on the United States' ability to reduce a reliance on imported aluminum, securing the supply chain, and potentially enabling domestic manufacturing, conserving critical materials. And also lowering the embedded energy and component costs. But the challenge is in the post-consumer scrap, it contains a lot of impurities in homogeneities and it's pretty variable. So what we did or what we're working on is taking this real world consumer scrap, not engineering it from primary elements, but taking real world scrap in the form of Twitch. used beverage cans and a product called ReMelt 6000 Series ReMelt, scrapping it and looking at blending those and running them through the shape process. So the challenge is these can't be recycled into conventionally extruded alloys unless they're diluted with a large amount of primary aluminum, which then is a challenge on the cost argument that I talked about previously. So the challenge here is these high elevated amounts of these alloying elements like silicon, iron, copper and manganese. These have to be dealt with. And it's the reason why they in conventional recycling, they go through an aluminum dilution process. So we've been looking at upcycling these for the automotive industry, and this work is currently being funded by CMEI's technology or transportation technologies office. So we're working with our partners at Autobond Metals, Tennessee Aluminum Processors, and Real Alloy. They've been absolutely fantastic partners in supplying the scrap to us. You know, even in 500,000 pound volumes, that's still small by standards of industry. So having partners that are willing to work with us and have the vision of what we're trying to do here has been very helpful. And then these materials go to Locust Technologies. Where they are blended into all sorts of different combinations that we have been looking at in just, you know, notionally here, blend A and blend B are just a couple examples that we have been looking at. We then take those, we develop the tooling, we develop the process parameters, the quench parameters, and do all of the fundamental science and materials characterization to try and figure out how to process the material to get advantageous properties. Here's an example of a typical microstructure, so this would be Blend A, which was 40% TWG, 30% UBC, and 30% RSI. This is what it looks like in the cast product, so this would be the billet material that's going into the shape extrusion press. with all of the different phases that are present and when it goes through the shape extrusion process all of those what we call intermetallics get refined into a very small size and dispersed throughout the matrix and some in some of them even down to the nanoscale so you get this really extensive refinement and dispersion of these second phases and what that does is it allows the shape process to tolerate these elevated levels of impurities. And so I'll walk you through this plot, which is a plot of mechanical strength for these two different blends, along with the elongation on the secondary y-axis. And so the dashed lines are the values for aluminum 6082 in the T6 condition. So elongation is the black dash that would compare to the black dots. Red is the yield strength when compared to the red columns and blue is the ultimate tensile strength which we can compare to the blue columns and our material both in the T6 and T8 conditions, two different tempers. And so you can see how the values compare. So if the columns are above the dashed lines, that's good. And 6082 is a really high quality extrusion alloy in the aluminum industry. Blend B. As I popped it up there, you can see that it's essentially no different, right? The properties are essentially the same. But when you look at the composition, blend A and blend B are much different. So in blend A, the silicon is about 40% higher, the iron is about 50% higher, and the manganese is about 30% lower. Much different composition than 6082, but still really good properties. And so the real advantage here is that the shape process has the ability to tolerate some of these compositional variations. And so I mentioned next steps for the project that we had been working on with Ford and team. The next step then is to make these F-150 roof rails in partnership out of 100% post-consumer scrap. So that is where we're heading next. Some other exciting applications for this. One is the building and construction sector. So, about... About 57% of the global market of extrusions, which is about $57 billion, is dedicated to the building and constructions industry, roughly. And somewhere in the neighborhood of 90% of that is aluminum 6063. Requirements of 6063 are a lot less demanding than automotive 6082. We feel there are compositions that can be used to mimic the performance, not entirely the composition, because it's very lean, but mimic the performance and make it from 100% post-consumer scrap as well. Another example is the power grid. In substations they use what are called seamless bus tubes and those are actually made out of aluminum 6061 and you can thoughtfully blend these scrap streams Thanks, James. and get a composition that's very similar to 6061 but with higher silicon and iron. But we know that those are the elements that are most readily tolerated by the shape process due to all of All of this refinement and just. dispersion of the second phase intermetallic, so we're working in that space as well. Another one is a newer concept of solid phase alloying. This is some staff members here that published in Nature recently where they took aluminum machining chips and then sprinkled in scrap of different alloying elements. And if you remember all the way back to that picture, that image I showed of the copper nickel laminated vortices mixing and diffusing and turning it into alloys, they're doing the same thing here to up convert. uh certain aluminum machining chips into high strength aluminum with scrap alloying elements that are forming alloys in situ. Another exciting area that we're working on currently too is actually moving beyond aluminum and doing titanium for aerospace applications. mostly for fasteners actually. So we're working across industry partners here with Boeing and Ameritai and Quintus and Solar Atmospheres to exercise a real industrial supply chain to take Ti-6Al-4V machining chips and ultimately receive billets of that and run it through our direct shape extrusion apparatus where we're getting remarkable properties where the yield strength and ultimate strength of Ti6-4 is above 1,000 megapascals with an elongation still of 15%. And the goal here is to bypass many of the steps that are required during the titanium recycling process and minimize the amount of fresh titanium sponge that's required to dilute the oxygen levels down in the machining scrap that comes back into the recycling process. So with that, I'm going to go ahead and turn it over to my colleague, Sarah Hunt, to talk about commercialization activities. Awesome. Thank you, Scott. All right. Thank you, Scott. Before we move on, I'd like to do a quick introduction of Sarah Hunt, who is a Senior Commercialization Manager here at PNNL in our Office of Collaboration and Commercialization. Sarah, would you like to tell us about partnering with PNNL and how our attendees can access the shape technology? Definitely. Thank you, Daryl. And thank you, Scott, for walking us through the SHAPE technology, its potential market applications, and the opportunities that it could create. So as Daryl noted, I'm going to shift from the technology itself to how you and interested organizations can engage with PNNL. Our Office of Collaboration and Commercialization helps connect external partners, whether you're a research organization, industry, or other org. Connect your interest with our relevant technologies, expertise, facilities, and innovations. And so the portfolio here for SHAPE covers 41 pending patents as well as 29 granted and international patents. This ranges from equipment, tooling, novel feedstocks, and material compositions for a variety of different applications that Scott noted ranging from automotive, aerospace, grid infrastructure, etc. So if you're interested and you see a potential fit for the SHAPE technology, we welcome conversations for collaboration, licensing, or other commercialization opportunities. Next slide, Scott. All right, so if you are interested in partnering with PNNL, as I noted, there are a variety of different pathways for research collaborations. Development, demonstrations, and deployment opportunities, all the way up to the commercialization. So depending upon your goals, interests, timeline, and sort of stage of development, I'll walk through each of these three pathways, but encourage you to reach out to that collaboration at PNNL following today's webinar if you're interested in learning more. So starting on the left, the technology transfer agreements. So for the intellectual property that I noted on the prior slide, be it equipment, tooling, methods, novel feedstocks and compositions for a variety of different applications, we have the ability to execute technology transfer agreements, whether that's a research use license, an option that would reserve specific commercial fields of use while you'll do your market and technical due diligence, all the way up to non-exclusive and exclusive commercial use licenses in specific fields of use for the technology. And then that middle pathway there, the sponsored research partnerships. So a lot of times we have industry that says, hey, this is a really interesting technology or capability, but can it do ABC or XYZ? In those cases, industry can come in and directly sponsor research related to whatever your business needs are for the further development of the technology, demonstrating it to help de-risk it with the PNNL expertise and equipment that we have. And then there on the right, and this is where a lot of our, you know, 20 plus industry research collaborations reside, is on collaborative research opportunities. So when the Department of Energy or other federal agencies and opportunities become available, we can put joint proposals together to further develop, demonstrate, and deploy the technology in your specific areas of interest. So as Scott noted, she... Could help U.S. manufacturers upcycle lower-cost feedstocks into high-performance materials. So, at the end of the day, for U.S. manufacturers, you know, this could mean lower-cost feedstock and that performance of material that meets or exceeds the specs, depending upon what those select applications are. And the potential... Reaches beyond just the aluminum, that was the focus here today, but if you were someone who was interested in potentially the copper, titanium, MMC, thermoelectrics, etc., would be happy to discuss how shape and those applications could help strengthen domestic supply chains and make use of those materials here. So in closing, we welcome continued conversations about your interest and how P&L expertise and the shape technology could help support your advanced manufacturing and metal upcycling goals. I'll hand it back over to you, Daryl. All right. Thank you for that, Sarah. Much appreciated. So we've already received some great questions and before we get to addressing those just want to remind everyone that we'll be taking questions through the question and answer tool so as we proceed with addressing these questions please feel free to continue to submit your questions. We aim to cover as many as possible during this session today but for those that we don't get to we will follow up offline and address all questions. So Scott, the first question, and like I said, I have several of these, but I'll go ahead and just take them one off as they were received. But the first one is, in regards to the consolidation and use of powder feedstocks, can you tell us how coarse does the powder need to be? Have you ever used shredded aluminum or other materials? Oh, thank you for that question. That's a good one. The limits. I would say we don't, we have not probed all the way to what the limits are. We have, I guess the, to try and be qualitative about it, we haven't, we haven't experienced too much difficulty with anything that you would call a powder, anything that's a sieve type powder. We have done, think of chunks that are on the order of. Two, three, four millimeters, something like that, that have been compressed together. Thank Those, that is something that we have, that we have, have done not much beyond that. Like I, I don't envision a time where we're, we're, we're dumping, you know, loose twigs. That's the size of golf balls and baseballs in there to do. But that's kind of the limit. One of the challenges associated with larger you. and larger pieces is the air pockets between them. If they don't get all the way worked out, they can cause blistering on the surfaces. So the more clunky and hard to pack together materials, the higher the opportunity is to create surfaces that aren't super high quality. All right. Excellent. Thank you, Scott. So, next question. You talked a lot about aluminum, gave some great examples of aluminum with shape processing. Can you talk about PNNL's progress towards using shape processing for other material systems like metal matrix composites and oxide dispersion strengthened materials? Yeah. So, so let's see. So with oxide dispersion, strengthen materials, those, uh, Those have been primarily in the area of steels and copper-based metal matrix composites for higher temperature applications like heat exchangers and things like that. So those are a couple applications for MMCs and ODS alloys that we have been working on over the years. All right. Excellent. Next question here, this is a good one. What is the maximum temperature seen by the materials during the shape process and how does this compare to the melting point of materials? Oh yeah, that is a good question. So it totally depends on the material, so I'll just give you kind of a just a quick sweep through here. So So for things like aluminum, you know, aluminum, pure aluminum will melt at, you know, 660 degrees C. But in a real alloy, there are lower melting point phases. For example, in aluminum 7075, you would have a low melting point phase that can melt somewhere in the range of like 470 degrees C. And so in either case, you have to process the material at a temperature below where something deleterious could happen. But in general, like for 6,000 series aluminums, we would process in the neighborhood of 500 to 520 degrees C. When we run titanium, we may be upwards of like 950 to 1,000 degrees C above the beta transus temperature. Coppers in the neighborhood of something like 600 to 700 C. So it really depends on the alloy and what's in the alloy. All right. Excellent. So along with describing some of the parameters and limitations on temperature with the process and different materials, Scott, can you tell us what is SHAPE's dimensional tolerance capability? What is the current capability for component dimension and wall thickness specifically? Yeah, so I guess a way to, I can describe how capable it is. Exact tolerance is going to depend on the material and shape what you're making and things like that. But I think the question is maybe coming from how does this compare to conventional extrusion? And I can answer that with the project that we have been doing with the Michigan-led team to develop this approach with Ford for making these F-150 roof rails in their factory. So as part of that, they, of course, gave us some very strict. dimensional requirements, both in terms of profile size and dimensions and the tolerances associated with those to be able to feed into their equipment, right? That's important. And so, and they're very stringent requirements, and we're able to meet those well within them, actually, to be able to get it into their production equipment. And so the potential exists to be able to hold dimensionality that's equivalent to commercial. Gotcha. Are there any other limits on materials that can be processed by shape, such as limit on modulus or melting point density, those sort of attributes of materials? Yeah, I think that so limitation is it has to be something that can plastically deform, meaning it can it can it can move and be worked. People ask us a lot of times, well, can you you know, can you do ceramics? No, because it's brittle and we'll just it will just fracture. And so as long as as long as it's deformable, it can be processed within limits because you have to have a tool set. And so that is one of the challenges associated with these higher temperature, more exotic alloys is that, yes, they're deformable. But what do you use to deform them? And those tools can be expensive to make. And so that's that's one of the one of the challenges. All right. Let me give you one specific example of a material system here. A question came in, Scott. Have you or PNNL, or can you, process zircaloy tubing? So zircaloy is, I can say that zircaloy is something that we have active research in right now. So the answer is yes, it can be processed. All right. Fair enough. I can't say much more than that just because it's an active spot that has some attention on it, so that's about all I can say. Yep, understand. Understand. Thanks. Thanks for answering what you can. Thank Back on aluminum powder sizes, here's a question. Can spherical aluminum powders, size 15 to 45 micron, be used? Yes. Did you say, Daryl, did you say aluminum? Aluminum, yes. you. Yeah, yes. Yep, no problem with that size. Let's see. Some others here are just trying to group some common ones. Talking about some of the commercialization efforts, can you highlight a little bit more concretely where some of the current commercialization efforts are coming from or going in incumbents and startups? Thank Maybe talk just a little bit about commercialization efforts overall, Scott or Sarah, for that matter. Definitely, I'll pass that one to Sarah. I'm happy to take this one, Scott. So for that slide that I showed that had just the broad overview in terms of numbers of the intellectual property, as of today, you. all of that background intellectual property is not encumbered. It is available for licensing in all fields of use. So we welcome people who are interested in discussing commercialization and collaboration opportunities. And in terms of differentiating this versus other startups, I don't want to speculate or speak on behalf of those. So I'll just speak and just reemphasize the unique value proposition that the shape technology holds and the ability here to upcycle that lower cost scrap material into high performance material that meet or exceed the specifications, depending upon what the product opportunity here is, and to be able to do that in a solid state. All right. Here's a question. It appears to have multiple questions embedded in it, so I'll try to break it down into a couple of different lines of questions or comments here for you, Scott. But regarding titanium chips and recycling of those, do you have any mechanical properties such as fatigue, fatigue crack growth? I Sensitivity, second phase particles, and so forth. Any information or anything off the top of your head you can share? We've published primarily on the composition, interstitials, mechanical properties so far, but this is an active area of research that is going on here at the lab, and so that data will be forthcoming. So yes, we're looking at fatigue, low and high cycle fatigue, hydrogen embrittlement, and all the things that one would care about for titanium. It's just a fairly nascent program that we have started here that we're working through. Here's a question about the ultraconductor material work ongoing at PNNL utilizing SHAPE. Can you speak to the IACS values that are being achieved in those materials right now? That one, I am going to have to take that one offline. I don't have those numbers at my fingertips since that large portfolio of work is handled by another staff member. I'm aware of it, but I can get that information as part of the Q&A responses. All right. Yep. And we can follow up with that. And for those who have specific questions about that particular product, as Scott said, we'll get you tied to the researcher leading that work around materials for power systems specifically. That goes well beyond just ultra conductors, but also includes magnetic materials and electric wires for transformers and such. That's right. Yeah. Here's a couple of questions, at least one around the commercialization, commercial teams. Perhaps this is a good one for Sarah. How do you collaborate internationally, specifically to Canadian research organizations? What are the limitations? Yeah so we regularly collaborate with international entities be that research organizations or private entities. So on the research side it's something that we do regularly and we would welcome those collaborations. On the commercialization side just do want to note for licensing that because this is a federally funded innovation for commercial use there is a requirement for U.S. manufacturing. Let's shift back to Scott here, perhaps a couple of softballs for you, Scott. Yeah. One of the attendees here is wondering if you have ever tried tungsten alloys with shape. We tried tungsten alloys as the tooling to process other things. So, no, we have not tried to process tungsten tooling as the subject. Subject. Right. Back on the aluminum specifically that you presented, for the blended feedstocks using RBCS, what happens to the anodic films on the surface during the shape process? I think this is asking about what's on the... Yeah, I think it's essentially the oxides and other films on the surface of the aluminum. What happens to those? Yeah, I'll just tell you what it is. So we work with Tennessee aluminum processors. They told us they cast it into sows, these big 2,000-pound ingots. And so a lot of that burns off and floats off. And so we take that, and then at Locust, they will recast our blend. And so. That is all going to float off as part of the casting process. A couple of questions here while my computer is just catching up. I've got several more coming in rapidly here. But there is a couple of questions related to, in the case of shape tubing, can it process variable wall thicknesses? And also, can it co-extrude? Actually, yeah, I can do both. So we have published papers on both of those, co-extruding, cladding, various aluminums and coppers on top of one another in a tubular format. So yes, in fact, a couple of years ago, In the area of variable wall thickness on seamless tubing, we actually won DOE's TTO project of the year for actually demonstrating that. Excellent. There's another question that just popped in about deliberately creating materials with differences or differentiations. So I think you just answered that, and the answer is yes, correct? Yeah, there's more. I can add a little bit more, Daryl. Yeah, if you will, please. One of the interesting things about the process that you can do that you can't do with a conventional extruder is you have the ability to tune the process during the extrusion. So you can rapidly change the temperature, for example, by slowing. We published on this as well. This can be read. This is public. Where imagine slowing down the feed rate and very quickly ramping up the RPM of the rotating component to spike the temperature and bring it up. Or vice versa. And so in a heat treatable alloy, you can adjust. Thank you In real time during the extrusion, what the subsequent precipitation strengthening is going to look like. very much, You can create one area of the material that is more formable, the next area that's more stiff, and back to being more formable. everyone, So you can actually create these variable properties along the length of the extrusion because you have these knobs to turn for being that are not available on a conventional extrusion approach. here. Gotcha. Here's another question back on the different material systems that can be processed by shape. Do you have any experience or have you considered novel boron alloys? That I haven't, so I'd love to hear more about what that is. That's not something that has approached us. Sounds cool, though. The attendee here makes a comment about applications in the space industry. Okay. Yeah, I'd love to hear about that. All right. Let's see here. Here's one that may take a little bit of explanation for you, Scott, but we'll give it a shot. What is the temperature range experienced by the aluminum material? How frequent do you observe discontinuity or the lack of consolidation between shredded or large chips along a unit length of the produced profile? So temperature variation. So let's see. So I'll tell you how we instrument it because this is public. We've published on it. So we will insert a thermocouple that gets spot welded right behind the face of the die in a few different locations and in the throat and things like that. So we get a pretty good indicator of what the temperature is close to the process zone, but it's not the temperature of the process zone. And so we actually had a fairly large multi-year laboratory initiative looking at solid phase processing where one of the primary outcomes was a really neat modeling capability called SPH modeling. And so with that, we were able to actually discover what the temperature was back in the area that's actually being deformed in the aluminum. And, you know, depending on the configuration and things like that, it's... You know, the temperature is like, you know, 40, 50 degrees C higher than what we actually measure at the face. And so there is a there's a variation in the temperature across the process zone. And then it quickly cools as it as it feeds through feeds through the die. So. So, um, When we say the process temperature, you know, what is the process temperature? It depends on where you're measuring. And so a little bit about how we determine what it is is a little bit of empiricism, right, where we do some trials and do some heat treating and hardness testing to figure out if we've hit the right temperature and then use our thermocouples as indicators as well. So that's the first part. Daryl, what was the second part of the question again, please? Scott, that's a great question. Let me see if I can pull that up real quick. You might have lost it. Let's see. I apologize. There are so many additional questions here. I lost track of the- I see it here, Daryl. I see it here. I can go ahead and do it. All right. Thank you. Thank you, Sarah. Yeah, so here's the second part of it. How frequent do you observe discontinuity or lack of the consolidation between the shredded or large chips along a unit length of the produced profile? OK, so so because of all of the extreme deformation. Um, they, the chips have to get pretty, well, let me, let me answer it this way. So we, we know when we compact the chips, if we're, if we're, before we process them, if we're up above. 85, 90% on the compaction, then we don't really see a porosity challenge. The porosity will close. I don't Below that, if you think of really, really loose pigtail-type chips and things like that, know then you can have challenges with welding of chips and such. Thank if you It just really depends on the morphology of the specific type of chip that is being processed through. can It really does. I hate to give the it depends answer, you hear but if you think of the limit like powders, that's easy. A really clunky chip, that's harder. very me. It just depends where you're at on the spectrum. All right. Thank you for that, Scott. I think we're running out of time here. much. There is one last question that is just an easy yes answer to. So I will go ahead and answer that. And that is or ask the question is, could a company purchase a shape two machine from Bond? And the question is, yes, you can contact Bond in Elkhart, Indiana, and they would be more than happy to chat with you about purchasing one of their machines. That was... Developed in conjunction with PNNL. And with that, that wraps up our Q&A session. If we couldn't get to your question, don't worry. We will follow up with you by email within the next week or so. Should you have further questions, please feel free to send us a note via email, which you can see at the bottom of your screen. Thank you once again for your participation in today's webinar. Your engagement and interests are greatly appreciated, and we look forward to future sessions for the webinar series. Thank you again. Have a great day.