Speaker Page

About Speaker

Olivier Martin is Chief Technology Officer for Rio Tinto Aluminium. He holds a Master’s degree from the National Chemical Engineering Institute in Paris. In the course of an international career spanning thirty three years Olivier Martin has contributed to the development of the primary smelting process as well as to improving its operation, with long term assignments in France, Greece and Mozambique and countless short term assignments all over the globe. During his 12 years in smelter operations, he mainly contributed to the development and implementation of operational best practices and cost reduction initiative. He was also engaged in smelter commissioning and start up, thereby helping to put into operation smelting technologies in whose design he himself had played an important part. However, it is in the R&D field that Olivier Martin spent most of his career and made his most significant contribution. His initial field of expertise was the numerical simulation of magnetohydrodynamic phenomena, through which he developed numerous innovative busbar systems and played a major part in the design of Rio Tinto’s latest cell technology, the AP60. Over time he has broadened the scope of his activity to cover overall cell design and process control up to the point of coordinating the work of the various specialists today engaged in the design of the latest reduction cell. He is now the Senior Technology expert for Rio Tinto Aluminium (RioExpert) as Chief Technology Officer. He has also authored numerous papers for TMS and Australasian conferences and holds more than 10 patents. He has received in 2018 the prestigious “Light Metal Division Technology Award” from The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society (TMS).