Objective
Its citizens as well as the natural world. A major user of environmentally hazardous chemicals is the metal finishing industry who use such substances to treat products for an extensive range of industries including automotive, aerospace, construction, galvanizing, general engineering, mining, nuclear and oil & gas. In recent years although the metal finishing industry has generally responded well to environmental concerns, stubborn problems remain. One of these problems is the elimination of hexavalent chromates of which over 56000 tonnes are discharged in the EU` , which represents more that 50% of global chromate waste. Chromates are used extensively for the passivation of zinc (including hot dip) and zinc alloy coatings and surfaces, and form an essential and integral part of the manufacturing process. This is causing considerable problems for the core group SME's in the treatment of threaded parts, coated steel panels and plates, electrical parts and so on. Their customers are demanding chromate free treatments and environmental legislation is increasing costs of effluent disposal. It is also a priority area within the EU to eliminate these toxic chemicals from metals processing, particularly in the automobile industry where chromates are widely used for the protection of zinc plated parts. Indeed a recent draft EC End of Life Vehicle directive(2) requires that hexavalent chromium contained in vehicles put on the market after 1st January 2003 should be prevented from being shredded or disposed of to landfill. In other words all components containing hexavalent chromium will have to be stripped at the end of vehicle life, clearly a very costly process. This project would make a major contribution toward negating this problem. The project will also assist the EC in its Best Available Techniques initiative as defined in the Council Directive(3), on Integrated Pollution prevention and Control by developing a new clean technology. The project involves 6 core group SME's from 4 member states and 3 research performers. The approach adopted in this project will be to use a new molybdate based (peroxomolybdate), chemical treatment previously developed for zinc nickel alloys, across a broad range of zinc based surfaces. The chemical behaviour of the new peroxomolybdate system is completely different from conventional molybdates or molybdate phosphate mixtures. Although very promising, the new treatment is only at the beaker stage but yet undoubtedly offers considerable promise for the core group SME's. The new treatment is much simpler than existing chromate free treatments such as those based on cobalt complex technology, which often do not satisfy customer demands. To broaden the scope, other chromate free systems will also be investigated including those based on silico molybdates and zirconium and rare earth metal salts.In addition new post passivation sealing treatments containing corrosion inhibitors will also be evaluated, in order to develop a total system approach. An assessment of the environmental impact and toxicology of the alternatives treatments will form a central part of the project
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- engineering and technologymechanical engineeringmanufacturing engineering
- natural scienceschemical sciencesinorganic chemistrytransition metals
- engineering and technologymaterials engineeringcoating and films
- engineering and technologyenvironmental engineeringwaste managementwaste treatment processes
- medical and health sciencesbasic medicinetoxicology
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Call for proposal
Data not availableFunding Scheme
CRS - Cooperative research contractsCoordinator
SK17 7LN Buxton
United Kingdom