4. Environmental aspects

As mentioned above, modern alloys can be made from a large number of metals, some of which alone can incorporate a dozen elements. This complexity does not favor recycling, since remelting possibilities are limited to mixtures of alloys with similar compositions or, at the very least, containing the same elements (the manufacture of an alloy B can only use a recycled alloy A if all the elements of A are present in B). Furthermore, some alloying elements have an intrinsic impact on the environment, either because their sources of supply are far away, or because the resources required to extract and purify them are substantial and damaging to the environment (soil and water pollution, water and energy consumption, carbon footprint, etc.).

The method described here makes it possible to design alloys by optimizing, at the same time as their...