WHAT IS ALUMINIUM?

September 27, 2018

Aluminium is a silvery-white metal, the 13 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 aluminium sulphates. 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.
Aluminium sulphates 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 aluminium sulphates 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.

Humphry Davy. The British physicist and chemist Sir Humphry Davy was the first to obtain a new chemical element using electrolysis: he was able to obtain boron from boric acid. He went on to use electrolysis to isolate six more previously unknown metals: potassium, sodium, barium, calcium, magnesium and strontium. It was Davy who proved the existence of aluminium, the metal found in alumina, and gave it its name.

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.

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Author:

Ms. Bonnie Liu

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