By Norma Bargary
Professors Norma Bargary and Michael Vynnycky from the Mathematics Applications Consortium for Science and Industry (MACSI) in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, and Associate Professor Ciarán Eising and Dr Tony Scanlon from the Department of Electronics and Computer Engineering at the University of Limerick (UL), have been awarded Horizon Europe funding as part of the €5.6 million Metallic Elements Dissipation Avoided by Life cycle design for Steel (MEDALS) project.
MEDALS is an inter-disciplinary, pan-European research programme, running from 2024 to 2028, which aims to promote sustainable practices in the steel industry across Europe by investigating and developing scrap preparation methods, researching new ways of sorting and separating scrap materials for removal of unwanted tramp elements such as copper and tin and recovery of valuable elements from residues of scrap-based steelmaking, and using advanced digital technologies and sensors to obtain finished products of higher quality.
MEDALS is assessing all main alloys during the sorting process, but for liquid steel is focusing on the removal of copper, which together with tin, is currently the main barrier to produce high quality steel from scrap.
The UL team are the first Irish researchers to be awarded funding from the Horizon Europe Clean Steel initiative, and in MEDALS are working with eight academic and industry partners in Sweden, Germany, Spain and Italy. The team are responsible for developing models and algorithms to help increase the recycling ratio of steel and metals through improved sorting of scrap and better separation of non-wanted tramp elements. The developed models will be verified with data from full-scale tests in industrially relevant environments.
Figure 1 Representatives of the MEDALS consortium, Bari 2025.
MACSI will host the MEDALS consortium in September 2025 at the University of Limerick, where the project team will deliver a bespoke workshop to students and academic researchers that details the key elements of the steel-making process with the aim of identifying avenues for future collaboration.
For more information on the MEDALS project, see https://www.medals.proj.kth.se/.