Basic Explanation Of Production Of Aluminum

Aluminum is very abundant in earth land, and it has very important applications in industry and engineering. Production of aluminum is a very basic process from its natural sources. In this article, we will show you how the element of aluminum is obtained from natural sources.

How Aluminum Is Obtained From Its Natural Sources?

Ore of aluminum is very abundant in earth crust. The ore of aluminum is called as bauxite which is the hyrated aluminum oxide(Al2O3-H2O) Obtaining pure aluminum is also basic process. The aluminum propductions steps can be summarized in three steps;

1. The aluminum ore, bauxite, must be cleansed to transmit that ore to other steps as usable material. After the cleansing of aluminum ore, these ores turned into fine powder forms.
2. The second process to obtain aluminum is called as Bayer process which took its name from its founder who is a German chemist. At high pressure, bauxite powders and NaOH(aqueous caustic soda) are soluted. With this chemical reaction, pure alumina(Al2O3) is precipitated. Alumina has also its own engineering applications, and because of that, it is an also important engineering ceramic material.
3. The third step is the electrolysis to spearate pure aluminum from alumina. To separate the alumina into its elements requires dissolving the precipitate in a molten bath of cryolit which is Na3AIF6. This solution is subjected to direct current between plates in a furnaces to obtain pure aluminum at cathode and oxygen at anode.

The production of pure aluminum include three basic steps, and in second step to obtain aluminum can be another step to obtain very important engineering material alumina.

Production steps of aluminum can be summarized as above. Do not forget to leavr your comments and questions about ‘aluminum’ and its production steps below!