National technical university of Athens

03 Sep 2020

The National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) is the oldest and most prestigious technical educational institution in Greece. Over the last 30 years NTUA has been actively participating in numerious national and international research and development projects. Nowadays, NTUA has more than 7000 students, employs 700 persons as academic staff and more than 2500 researchers. Based on Euro Research Ranking Data, NTUA reached 10th place in 2010 between educational organizations and 3rd position on Networking Rank (Reputation). Last year only, was coordinating or participating in 67 European projects and the last decade was funded from European Commission 400M€. NTUA is a Partner in EIT Raw Materials.

The Laboratory of Metallurgy (LabMet) has experienced significant progress in the last 30 years in terms of research and development projects in various fields, like extractive metallurgical process development, rehabilitation of sites polluted from mining and metallurgical industries, thermodynamic studies of metallurgical systems, mathematical modelling, simulation of metallurgical and environmental protection processes, synthesis of inorganic polymeric materials from mining and metallurgical wastes, networking in the areas of mining, ornamental stones and processing. All these activities have led to the gain of considerable expertise and international reputation. In the last 10 years alone the laboratory of metallurgy has been involved in more than 30 National and European research projects, attracting in total more than 10 million Euros in funding and producing more the 300 scientific publications in international journals and international scientific conferences. The Laboratory of Metallurgy currently employs 6 members of academic staff, 5 senior engineers holding Ph. D. degree and over 15 postgraduate students. The approved research funding of the laboratory for the last 3 years was 6 million euros.

NTUA LabMet has expertise in hydrated aluminas precipitation from alkaline solutions and has invented and patented the “boehmite process”, a process for precipitating boehmite from supersaturated aluminate solutions.

In SisAl Pilot, NTUA will be involved in the hydrometallurgical processing of slags, after the reductive smelting of raw materials, including leaching with Na2CO3/NaOH solutions for the production of aluminate solutions suitable for subsequent treatment, precipitation of tri-hydrated alumina from aforementioned solutions and calcination thereof, in order to produce metallurgical grade alumina. In addition, NTUA will assist MYTILINEOS in performing the pilot scale tests.