Scandium

 

The Syerston Scandium Project hosts one of the world’s largest and highest-grade accumulations of scandium ever discovered.  While the potential applications of scandium are broad, Sunrise Energy Metals has focused on three key areas: aluminium scandium alloys for light-weighting the global transport industry the use of scandium in solid oxide fuel cells and more recently the adoption of scandium in radio frequency (RF) filtering technologies used in mobile communication systems.

While the solid oxide fuel cell industry has been the dominant consumer of scandium in recent years, scandium’s greatest value lies in the functional properties it imparts as an alloy in aluminium.  Aluminium-scandium (AlSc) alloys represent one of the largest untapped opportunities for delivering light-weighting solutions to the global transport sector. Likewise, the use of AlSc alloys with high scandium content are becoming increasingly important in the semiconductor market for manufacture of radio frequency front end (RFFE) chips.

The absence of a reliable supply of scandium, coupled with a concern about the ability of scandium supply to scale rapidly, have been the limiting factors in developing this market. This is set to change as scandium from primary mine production is brought on stream and gradually expanded.

Please click here for more information regarding scandium and advanced lightweight alloys.