About the MEDALS Project

The research project MEDALS stands for Metallic Elements Dissipation Avoided by Life cycle design for Steel. It is coordinated by KTH Royal institute of Technology, has seven partners and is funded by Horizon Europe.

Project objective

The proposed project aims to increase recycling ratio of steel and metals through improved sorting of scrap, better separation of non-wanted tramp elements as well as the valuable alloying elements. Steel can be recycled over and over again while retaining its technical properties. However, contaminations of tramp elements and losses of alloying elements do occur in the solid state and liquid state recovery processes currently employed in the industrial value chain.

The project aims to enhance the integrated value chain of scrap based steel production through; investigate and develop scrap preparation methods, research new ways of sorting and separation of material, investigate and develop specific methods to remove copper and tin in the liquid phase and to recover copper form steelmaking residues through pyrometallurgical processes, create new steel products that can handle a higher copper content while maintaining required application properties, and finally lab-scale experiments to develop thermodynamic and kinetic modelling focusing on tramp elements.

The target is to achieve 90% EOL recovery rates and a reduction of tramp elements by 60-70%, improved separation and sorting of scrap with a targeted increase in separation specificity of 50% and a target of copper element recovery from steelmaking residues about 60%. Ultimately the developed models will, when relevant, be verified with data from full-scale tests in industrially relevant environments.