Central to the competitiveness of Rio Tinto Alcan and other aluminum manufacturers, is the quantitative linkage between products and the processes by which they are made. This type of activity has gained attention internationally and there are significant programs underway to develop through process models for various metallurgical fabrication processes. Inherently, the need for these types of models is that the properties of the metal products depend on the microstructure of the material which in turn is a complex function of composition, grain size and orientation, distribution of phases...