ALUMINUM

Industrial Materials & Processes

Submitted to:
Prof. Kristoffer Mira
Submitted by:
Joseph Gabriel A. Jarabe
BSIE 3-1

History of Aluminum
Etymology

The name 'Aluminum' was coined by English chemist Sir Humphry Davy (1778-1829), from the
Latin words 'alumen' or 'alum' which literally means bitter salt, because it was recognised as a
whitish mineral salt. Davy originally called it alumium (1812), but his publishers amended this to
aluminum, which remains the U.S. word. British editors amended the name again to aluminium
which is the modern preferred British form, to better harmonize with other element names like
sodium, potassium, etc."
Aluminum is the most abundant (8,13%) metallic element in the earth's crust and
after oxygen and silicon, the third most abundant of all elements in the crust. Because of its
strong affinity to oxygen, it is not found in the elemental state but only in combined forms such
as oxides or silicates.
Background
It is only 160 years since the element aluminium was discovered and only 100 years since a
viable production process was established and today more aluminium is produced each year
than all other non-ferrous metals combined.
Aluminium is the third most abundant element - comprising some 8 percent of the earth's
crust. So, why was it not discovered sooner? The main reason is that aluminium never occurs
naturally in metallic form. Aluminium is found in most rocks, clay, soil and vegetation
combined with oxygen and other elements.
Aluminium bearing compounds have been used by man from the earliest times; pottery was
made from clays rich in hydrated silicate of aluminium. Ancient Middle Eastern civilisations
used aluminium salts for the preparation of dyes and medicines: they are used to this day in
indigestion tablets and toothpaste. At one point in history, aluminium was such a valuable
commodity that rulers and the wealthy preferred impressing their guests with plates and
cutlery made from aluminium rather than gold.

History of Discovery
1807
The English chemist Sir Humphrey Davy underlined the existence of the element arguing that
"alum" was the salt of an unknown metal which he said should be called alumium. The name
was respell as the more pleasant sounding aluminium by later scientists. Davy tried
unsuccessfully to produce aluminium by electrolyzing a fused mixture of aluminium oxide and

potash.
1825
Following Davys work the Danish
physicist H.C. Oersted managed to
produce the first nodules of aluminium
by heating potassium amalgam with
aluminium.
Hans Christian Oersted from Denmark
was successful in 1825; however he apparently produced an aluminium alloy with the
elements
used
in
the
experiments,
rather
than
pure
aluminium.
Hans Christian's work wa s continued by Friedrich Woehler, a German chemist, who set about
working from 30 grams of aluminium powder in October 22, 1827. It took another 18 years of
continuous experimentation for Friedrich to create small balls of solidified molten aluminium
(globules) in 1845.
1845
Friedrich Whler in Germany established many of the metals properties, including the
remarkable lightness. It was the discovery of this property that truly excited researchers and
paved the way for more generous development funding.
Frederick Whler improved the process between 1827 and 1845 by substituting potassium for
the amalgam and by developing a better method for dehydrating aluminum. In 1854 Henri
Sainte-Claire Deville substituted sodium for the relatively expensivepotassium and, by
using sodium aluminum chloride instead of aluminum chloride, produced the first commercial
quantities of aluminum in a pilot plant near Paris. Several plants using essentially this process
were subsequently built in Great Britain, but none survived for long the advent in 1886 of the
electrolytic process, which has dominated the industry ever since.
1854
The Frenchman Henri Sainte-Claire Deville developed a reduction process using sodium
which, with further refinement by others, allowed the production of high cost metal in limited
quantities and his process was copied throughout Europe. Scientists were now in the position
to produce kilograms rather than mere grams - an important step towards the industrial use of
aluminium.
1886
The smelting process that is still used today was discovered almost simultaneously but
independently in the United States and France. Working in a woodshed in Ohio, Charles

Martin Hall made the same discovery that metallurgist Paul Lois Toussaint Hroult made in a
makeshift laboratory in Gentilly: both men dissolved aluminium oxide in molten cryolite and
then extracted the aluminium by electrolysis.
Hall filed patents in the USA and Hroult in France but Hall was eventually credited with
being the earlier inventor due to the slightly earlier patent application that he made.
1888
The success of the Hall/Hroult process was advanced when Karl Bayer, an Austrian, invented
an improved process for making aluminium oxide from bauxite. These inventions sealed the
fate of aluminium by 1890 the cost of aluminium had tumbled some 80 percent from
Devilles prices. The metal was now a commercial commodity, how would it be used?

What is Aluminum?
Aluminium is a silvery-white metal, the 13 th element in the periodic table. One surprising fact
about aluminium is that it's the most widespread metal on Earth, making up more than 8% of the
Earth's core mass. It's also the third most common chemical element on our planet after oxygen
and
silicon.
At the same time, because it easily binds with other elements, pure aluminium does not occur
in nature. This is the reason that people learned about it relatively recently. Formally aluminium
was produced for the first time in 1824 and it took people another fifty years to learn to produce
it
on
an
industrial
scale.
The most common form of aluminium found in nature is aluminiumsulphates. These are
minerals that combine two sulphuric acids: one based on an alkaline metal (lithium, sodium,
potassium rubidium or caesium) and one based on a metal from the third group of the periodic
table,
primarily
aluminium.
Aluminiumsulphates are used to this day to clean water, for cooking, in medicine, in
cosmetology, in the chemical industry and in other sectors. By the way, aluminium got its name
from aluminiumsulphates which in Latin were called alumen.
Today we know about almost 300 various aluminium compounds and minerals containing
aluminium, from feldspar, a key source mineral on Earth, to ruby, sapphire and emerald, which
are

far

less

common.

But regardless of how common aluminium may be, it may have remained hidden forever if it
hadn't been for electricity. The discovery of aluminium was made possible when scientists were
able to use electricity to break down chemical compounds into their elements. In the 19 century
the Danish physicist Christian Oersted used electrolysis to obtain aluminium. Electrolysis or
electrolytic reduction is the process that is used to produce aluminium today as well.
Another rather common mineral, bauxite, is used today as the primary raw material in
aluminium production. Bauxite is a clay mineral comprising various modifications of aluminium
hydroxide mixed with iron, silicon, titanium, sulphur, gallium, chromium, vanadium oxides,
as well as sulphuric calcium, iron and magnesium carbonates. In other words, your typical
bauxite contains almost half the periodic table. By the way, because of the texture of bauxite
about a hundred years ago aluminium was often referred to rather poetically as silver obtained
from clay. On the average 4-5 tonnes of bauxite are needed to produce 1 tonne of aluminium.
Bauxites
Bauxites were discovered in 1821 by geologist Pierre Berthier in
Southern France. The new minerals were named after the area they were
discovered in: Les Baux. About 90% of the global supply of bauxites is
found in tropical and subtropical areas such as Guinea, Australia,
Vietnam, Brazil, India and Jamaica.

PROPERTIES OF ALUMINUM:
Weight
One of the best known properties of aluminium is that it is light, with a density one third that of
steel, 2,700 kg/m3. The low density of aluminium accounts for it being lightweight but this does
not affect its strength.
Strength
Aluminium alloys commonly have tensile strengths of between 70 and 700 MPa. The range for
alloys used in extrusion is 150 300 MPa. Unlike most steel grades, aluminium does not become
brittle at low temperatures. Instead, its strength increases. At high temperatures, aluminiums
strength decreases. At temperatures continuously above 100C, strength is affected to the extent
that the weakening must be taken into account.

Linear expansion
Compared with other metals, aluminium has a relatively large coefficient of linear expansion.
This has to be taken into account in some designs.
Machining
Aluminium is easily worked using most machining methods milling, drilling, cutting,
punching, bending, etc. Furthermore, the energy input during machining is low.
Formability
Aluminiums superior malleability is essential for extrusion. With the metal either hot or cold,
this property is also exploited in the rolling of strips and foils, as well as in bending and other
forming operations.
Conductivity
Aluminium is an excellent conductor of heat and electricity. An aluminium conductor weighs
approximately half as much as a copper conductor having the same conductivity.
Joining
Features facilitating easy jointing are often incorporated into profile design. Fusion welding,
Friction Stir Welding, bonding and taping are also used for joining.
Reflectivity
Another of the properties of aluminium is that it is a good reflector of both visible light and
radiated heat.
Screening EMC
Tight aluminium boxes can effectively exclude or screen off electromagnetic radiation. The
better the conductivity of a material, the better the shielding qualities.
Corrosion resistance
Aluminium reacts with the oxygen in the air to form an extremely thin layer of oxide. Though it
is only some hundredths of a (my)m thick (1 (my)m is one thousandth of a millimetre), this layer
is dense and provides excellent corrosion protection. The layer is self-repairing if damaged.
Anodising increases the thickness of the oxide layer and thus improves the strength of the natural
corrosion protection. Where aluminium is used outdoors, thicknesses of between 15 and 25 m
(depending on wear and risk of corrosion) are common.
Aluminium is extremely durable in neutral and slightly acid environments.
In environments characterised by high acidity or high basicity, corrosion is rapid.

Non-magnetic material
Aluminium is a non-magnetic (actually paramagnetic) material. To avoid interference of
magnetic fields aluminium is often used in magnet X-ray devices.
Zero toxicity
After oxygen and silicon, aluminium is the most common element in the Earths crust.
Aluminium compounds also occur naturally in our food.

PRODUCTION/ EXTRACTION PROCESS:

The Bayers Process is

the principal industrial means
of refining bauxite to
produce alumina (aluminium oxide). Bauxite, the most important ore of aluminium, contains
only 3054% aluminium oxide, (alumina), Al2O3, the rest being a mixture of silica, various iron
oxides, and titanium dioxide. The aluminium oxide must be purified before it can be refined to
aluminium metal.
The process stages are:
1. Milling
The bauxite is washed and crushed, reducing the particle size and
increasing the available surface area for the digestion
stage. Lime and "spent liquor" (caustic soda returned from the
precipitation stage) are added at the mills to
makepumpable slurry.
2. Desilication
Bauxites that have high levels of silica (SiO2) go through a process to remove this impurity.
Silica can cause problems with scale formation and quality of the final product.

3. Digestion
A hot caustic soda (NaOH) solution is used to
dissolve the aluminium-bearing minerals in the
bauxite (gibbsite, bhmite and diaspore) to form a
sodium aluminate supersaturated solution or
pregnant liquor.
Gibbsite:
Al(OH)3 + Na+ + OH- Al(OH)4- + Na+
Bhmite and Diaspore:
AlO(OH) + Na+ + OH- + H2O Al(OH)4- + Na+
Conditions within the digester (caustic concentration, temperature and pressure) are set
according to the properties of the bauxite ore. Ores with high gibbsite content can be processed
at 140C, while bhmitic bauxites require temperatures between 200 and 280C. The pressure is
not important for the process as such, but is defined by the steam saturation pressure of the
process. At 240C the pressure is approximately 3.5 MPa.
The slurry is then cooled in a series of flash tanks to around 106C atmospheric pressure and by
flashing off steam. This steam is used to preheat spent liquor. In some high temperature
digestion refineries, higher quality bauxite (trihydrate) is injected into the flash train to boost
production. This "sweetening" process also reduces the energy usage per tonne of production.
Although higher temperatures are often theoretically advantageous, there are several potential
disadvantages, including the possibility of oxides other than alumina dissolving into the caustic
liquor.
4. Clarification/Settling
The first stage of clarification is to separate the solids (bauxite residue) from the pregnant liquor
(sodium aluminate remains in solution) via sedimentation. Chemical additives (flocculants) are
added to assist the sedimentation process. The bauxite residue sinks to the bottom of the settling
tanks, then is transferred to the washing tanks, where it undergoes a series of washing stages to
recover the caustic soda (which is reused in the digestion process).
Further separation of the pregnant liquor from the bauxite residue is performed utilising a series
of security filters. The purpose of the security filters is to ensure that the final product is not
contaminated with impurities present in the residue.

Depending on the requirements of the residue storage facility, further thickening, filtration
and/or neutralisation stages are employed prior to it being pumped to the bauxite residue
disposal area.
5. Precipitation
In this stage, the alumina is recovered by crystallisation from the pregnant liquor, which is
supersaturated in sodium aluminate.
The crystalisation process is driven by progressive cooling of the pregnant liquor, resulting in
the formation of small crystals of aluminiumtrihydroxite (Al(OH) 3, commonly known as
hydrate), which then grow and agglomerate to form larger crystals. The precipitation reaction
is the reverse of the gibbsite dissolution reaction in the digestion stage:
Al(OH)4- + Na+ Al(OH)3 + Na+ + OH6. Evaporation
The spent liquor is heated through a series of heat exchangers and subsequently cooled in a
series of flash tanks. The condensate formed in the heaters is re-used in the process, for
instance as boiler feed water or for washing bauxite residue. The remaining caustic soda is
washed and recycled back into the digestion process.
7. Classification
The gibbsite crystals formed in precipitation are classified into size ranges. This is normally
done using cyclones or gravity classification tanks (a series of thickeners utilising the same
principles as settlers / washers on the clarification stage). The coarse size crystals are destined
for calcination after being separated from spent liquor utilising vacuum filtration, where the
solids are washed with hot water.
The fine crystals, after being washed to remove organic impurities, are returned to the
precipitation stage as fine seed to be agglomerated.
8. Calcination
The filter cake is fed into calciners where they are roasted at temperatures of up to 1100C to
drive off free moisture and chemically-connected water, producing alumina solids. There are
different calcination technologies in use, including gas suspension calciners, fluidised bed
calciners and rotary kilns.
The following equation describes the calcination reaction:
2Al(OH)3 Al2O3 + 3H2O

Alumina, a white powder, is the product of this step and the final product of the Bayer Process,
ready for shipment to aluminium smelters or the chemical industry.

Sample Products:
Aluminum utensils are sturdy pieces of kitchen equipment that can last for a long time. There are
a wide variety of examples of aluminum utensils, which divide roughly into three groups: eating
utensils, stirring utensils and cooking utensils. Each of these utensils has its own specific purpose
and works in tandem with the others.

Kitchenware
Examples of aluminum utensils:

Knives
Forks
Spoons
Plates
Bowls
Cooking pan
Egg beater
Strainer
aluminumfoils

Other materials

Bicycle frame
Eyeglass frame
Wiring
Antenna

Alternative Products:

MAGNESIUM

Magnesium is one of the lightest structural metals available and weighs about 25% as much as
steel. It is particularly useful for castings and has the best strength to weight ratio of all the
standard structural metals. However, like aluminium, magnesium suffers from a higher cost
compared to steels and a volatile price market makes using the material in the long term difficult.
Use of magnesium as an alternative to steels began in the aerospace industry where pressures for
producing lighter components have existed for many years. With automotive manufacturers now
facing similar challenges, magnesium has increased in application and covers components such
as wheels, mount brackets, instrument panels, intake manifolds, cylinder head covers, steering
components, IP beams and seat frames.
Use as a structural metal in magnesium alloys represents about a third of the industrial
application of this material. Alloying with aluminum represents 40-45% of the industrial usage
while application to desulfurization for iron and steel processing consumes 13%.

Advantages of Magnesium
Considerably lighter than steels
Best strength-to-weight ratio of commonly used structural metals
Excellent damping capacity

Disadvantages of Magnesium
Concerns about general corrosion performance
A volatile market can affect price considerably
High melting point can make magnesium components difficult to weld with adhesives often
used as an alternative

TITANIUM
Titanium is another metal prized for its high strength to weight ratio as well as being highly
corrosion resistant. In fact, titanium is reported to have the highest strength to weight ration of
any metal. The material is 45% lighter than steel while retaining the same levels of strength and
similar in weight to aluminum but more than twice as strong.
The inherent properties of Titanium can be further enhanced by creating an alloy with iron,
aluminium and other elements to produce very strong and lightweight materials.

Many industries take advantage of titaniums high strength to weight ratios, often using it as an
alloy. In the aerospace market, titanium is used for jet engine discs, blades, shafts and casings as
well as a wide variety of airframe applications including fasteners, landing gear and wing beams.
To illustrate its use, titanium makes up around 15% of the Boeing 787 aircraft. The military
industry often utilizes titanium for lightweight armour plating while the marine industry take
advantage of the materials corrosion resistance to manufacturer high quality propellers.
Advantages of Titanium
Highest strength to weight ration of any metal
High corrosion resistance
High fatigue resistance
Non-toxic

Disadvantages of Titanium
Material stiffness not as good as aluminum alloys or carbon fiber
Comparatively high cost

CARBON FIBER
Aluminium is a material commonly used but carbon fiber provides a new solution for many
construction engineers.
Carbon fiber is used in industries where high strength and rigidity are required in relation to
weight. e.g. in aviation, automated machines, racing cars, professional bicycles, rehabilitation
equipment.
Due to its unique design, carbon fiber is also used in the manufacture of luxury goods including
watches, wallets etc. This material makes the product unique in the world of luxury and elegance
and helps it to be one step ahead of the competition.
It is not easy to compare properties of carbon fiber against steel or aluminium. Unlike carbon
fiber, metals are usually uniform isotropic, which ensures the same properties in every
direction.
Strength and rigidity of a carbon fiber component is created by positioning fabrics in a specific
way. This presents opportunities for the manufacturer but also requires great knowledge and
expertise.

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5.
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7.
8.
9.

This study analyzes the 10 most important properties for construction engineers:
Rigidity and strength of material in relation to weight.
Rigidity and strength of material of the same thickness.
Weight / density.
Machining.
Thermal expansion.
Heat conduction .
Resistance to temperature
Long term performance.
Implementation of production process.
Carbon fiber is pretty great stuff when strength/weight ratio is a primary concern -- race cars being an
obvious example. Lots of applications, however, work quite well with good old fashioned metal. The
high tensile strength of carbon fiber is not always very important. It has zero compressive or shear
strength on its own, so almost all engineering applications require making composite materials. That
makes it intrinsically harder to work with in a lot of ways. (You can't shape composites with the same
techniques used for metals.) Aside from manufacturability constraints, there are several genuine
engineering
downsides
that
make
carbon
fiber
useless
for:
Any
application
where
heat
conduction
matters,
like
engines
- Parts that require isotropic material properties (ie no preferred orientation or grain) like ball
bearings
- Parts that need to yield plastically without shattering, like crumple zones in cars
- Sections that must be permanently connected (welded) together in final assembly in a way that
maintains
full
material
strength
throughout
the
seam
- Cyclic loading applications where composites are difficult to estimate fatigue life
- Complex shapes that must be milled out from a blank or casting