Alcan Engineered Products, a business unit of Rio Tinto Alcan, and AFNOR (French Association for Standardisation) are launching AluTool®, a new guidebook and software application helping business managers to better leverage the technical potential of aluminium alloys for their industrial projects.

For many years, the aluminium industry has been creating and harmonising general application standards for aluminium. The AluTool® book and software was especially developed to help small and medium businesses, entrepreneurs and universities easily find essential information on aluminium alloys properties, applications and corresponding standards.

"Industry users of aluminium are confronted to difficult choices when it comes to selecting one or another aluminium alloy for one or several applications", explained Christel Bories, President & CEO of Alcan Engineered Products. "For each alloy family, AluTool® provides an extensive set of information, including chemical composition, mechanical properties and many other characteristics. It also lists the latest available products and the standards linked to the selected application."

Written by Michel Canton from Alcan Engineered Products, an expert in the aluminium industry, and Serge Sochon from AFNOR, a specialist in aluminium standards, AluTool® is the fruit of a multi-year collaboration during which they analysed the huge technical wealth contained in the corpus of international and European standards concerning aluminium and its alloys.

An original concept, AluTool® consists of a bilingual package - available in French and English - including a booklet and a software tool on CD Rom. This user-friendly software answers the question: "Which types of aluminium alloy best fit my project?" through a list of "Aluminium for Innovation" proposals.

"The software helps users obtain very rapidly a solution to their problem and enables them to select the right alloy for any application," continues co-author Michel Canton. "They can easily create and manage customised projects, familiarise themselves with the many applications of aluminium alloys and promote its usage".

Deliberately customer and market oriented, AluTool® answers the needs of businesses for which standardisation is a «marketing» tool, in particular in the fields of mass transportation, automotive, aerospace, marine, food, design or architecture.

AluTool® is published and distributed in Europe by AFNOR, the international services group expert in standardisation, certification, specialised edition and training. AFNOR is located in 90 countries.