NRT Partnering on Project to Recycle Aerospace Metals

National Recovery Technologies Inc., based in Nashville, Tenn., is taking part in an $11.5 million project in order to improve recycling of aerospace metals like titanium and nickel-cobalt superalloys.

The company and its joint venture partners — wTe Corp., Bedford, Mass., and Energy Research Company, Staten Island — were tapped for the project by the U.S. Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology as part of its Technology Innovation Program.

The four-year project, which begins Jan. 1, aims to find ways to use sensors to quickly sort aerospace scrap by alloy type.

As its part of the project, National Recovery Technologies will produce sorting systems that use X-ray technologies to quickly identify different metals. It will be a refinement of work NRT has already done with wTe as part of the companies’ Spectramet LLC joint venture.

NRT president and CEO Ed Sommer said the company already has industrial partners eager to test the new technologies.

“The project will lessen our national dependence on supplies of virgin strategic metals refined from ores sourced from overseas, and will provide substantial energy savings from use of scrap metals rather than virgin metals produced from ores. An additional benefit will be significantly reduced emissions since scrap smelting requires much less energy than primary production,” said Charles Ross, NRT’s chairman.