Alpha Sigma Mu Lecturer: Brajendra Mishra, FASM, Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Special Sessions

Alpha Sigma Mu Lecturer

Brajendra Mishra, FASM
Worcester Polytechnic Institute

“Materials Regeneration for Societal Sustainability”

Materials are the enablers of all kinds of technologies we rely on today to support human life and happiness. With global population approaching ten billion by the middle of this century, scientific advances have to keep pace to maintain the materials availability.  Metals and materials production from primary sources, such as ore, are highly energy intensive, expensive and environmentally unfriendly. Materials are non-renewable and, therefore, their supply is limited. Post-consumer as well as manufacturing wastes are valuable secondary resources. Most structural and functional materials used today, can be regenerated and put back into service at a much lower cost and energy consumption through conscious reuse, recycling and recovery programs. Most production wastes, such as mineral processing tailings, mechanical processing swarfs and solid pyrometallurgical processing effluents, as well as, post-consumer wastes from the aerospace, automotive, energy-storage and electronic industries, present tremendous opportunities to improve resource productivity. To ensure secure materials supply and attenuate supply-demand imbalance, it is of utmost importance to look at opportunities to regenerate materials from secondary sources and put them back to use. This presentation will describe the technological developments made to convert these valuable resources into functional manufactured materials for industrial applications.