Aluminium: The metal that just keeps on giving
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
They are hugely energy intensive and a good way of exporting cheap electricity from otherwise hard to connect locations. The very bottom of New Zealand, The North east of South Africa as well as Mozambique, the Middle East and of course Norway and Russia. Hydroelectric power, free once the dam is built, is ideal, but oil (Middle East) and coal (Southern Africa) are also used.
They are generally located next to a port so that bulk shipments of alumina and carbon (coal) are easily transferred. The carbon is used to make the anodes and cathodes used in the giant 'pots' where the reaction happens.
The metal itself is alloyed up in final form, but is generally shipped from the smelters in pure ignots, at a price related to the LME quoted price.
And a bonus - we were forbidden to have aluminium cans on site. If they ended up in a pot (full of molten bubbling alumina, cryolite and aluminium) then any fluid left inside the can would get super heated and result in an explosion.
Another alumin(i)um/electricity anecdote - apparently the smelter in the mountains behind Portland, which was built to take advantage of the cheap hydro electricity there, closed down when Google and Amazon built datacanters there and outbid the Alumin(i)um companies for the electricity…
It is quite a complex issue, yes. Looks like treasury was fairly firmly against subsidising the smelter from an economic standpoint. Of course there are social issues, too.
More efficient how? Power consumption? Or just better margins? If power consumption; presumedly not enough to significantly alter electricity prices for others? Is there anything I can read on this?
Sir Humphrey Davy, its discoverer, called it Aluminum when he published his work Chemical Philosophy in 1812.
Some anonymous dilettante (anonymous to this day!) thought, upon reviewing said book, it sounded better (more classical) with the extra I and syllable.
Everybody calls Aluminum's oxide Alumina, not Aluminia.
Nobody else seems to feel the need to rename Platinum Platinium, or Molybdenum Molybdenium, or Tantalum Tantalium.
We Americans too often like to mock other cultures for being different, and our basis is usually wrong when we do. Maybe mocking our pronunciation and spelling isn't a habit you want to hold on to.
Wikipedia seems to have a different story that you.
Davy settled on aluminum by the time he published his 1812 book Chemical Philosophy
== The main point of context.
From Wikipedia:
"Two variants of the metal's name are in current use, aluminium and aluminum (besides the obsolete alumium). The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) adopted aluminium as the standard international name for the element in 1990 but, three years later, recognized aluminum as an acceptable variant. Hence their periodic table includes both. IUPAC prefers the use of aluminium in its internal publications, although nearly as many IUPAC publications use the spelling aluminum.
Most countries use the spelling aluminium. In the United States and Canada, the spelling aluminum predominates. The Canadian Oxford Dictionary prefers aluminum, whereas the Australian Macquarie Dictionary prefers aluminium. In 1926, the American Chemical Society officially decided to use aluminum in its publications; American dictionaries typically label the spelling aluminium as "chiefly British"." [1]
I have a feeling if Americans said "aluminium" and Brits said "aluminum", you wouldn't be saying this. I see no reason why the discoverer's naming deserves any special status.
At its most basic, this is one of the main currencies of science. Remember what happened with apatosaurus / brontosaurus?
This is a practice that most people will agree without persuasion is "fair", that certain people care about a great deal, and that costs society nothing. What's wrong with it?
There is no real discoverer. Its like crediting Columbus with discovering America? Or Al Gore with inventing the internet?
Wolfram story is probably a decent analogy. Some Swede described an ore in a book and named it after himself, then a sample of his ore that was contaminated with wolframite (named by german Agricola, yes, by that famous Agricola) had an acid extraction run on it, that resulted in what we'd now call impure raw tungstic acid. A lot of people thought that acid was pretty interesting but it took some Spanish dudes to reduce the acid to a completely worthless metal. Then two centuries later one American dude came up with a way of purification and heat treatment such that it finally made a decent wire for electric light bulb (no, not the guy you're thinking of, a plant scale engineer decades after the inventor) and then General Electric (at that time an American company unlike now) tried to patent the whole process. Such that in the 1920s, or whatever it was, you'd have a chemical element where its only industrial production was patented, which sounds crazy in 2013 but wasn't all that unusual about a century ago. And that patent got overturned if I recall correctly (no I'm not that old, just from memory)
The point of this ramble about Schelium metal lightbulbs is given some research there IS NO DISCOVERER. Other than the victor writes the histories and such, which is trivially interesting from a sociological perspective but has no actual hard science meaning.
Apparently that's the equivalent of saying Newton invented calculus w/o mentioning Leibniz.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium
To be fair he didn't know what he wanted to call it. "In 1808, Humphry Davy identified the existence of a metal base of alum, which he at first termed alumium...", so whoever the dilettante was can't blame them to too much, for wanted to have a standard spelling for it.
http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2004-09/amazing-rustin...
Since sapphire is already 100% aluminium oxide, but arranged in a crystal lattice I think it should be stable in contact with mercury unless the mercury disrupts the lattice (a possibility--my physical chemistry is weak).
If you know how to do it safely，go for it!
Another comment is sulfur is cheap and widely available at garden stores etc and cinnabar toxicity is greatly exaggerated, because historically anyone who mined it, smelted it, and the smelting is a very effective way to get killed just by being nearby. I wouldn't eat it intentionally, etc, but after sulfur neutralization its mostly harmless. Its a much lower vapor pressure and relatively stable compound compared to elemental Hg.
And it'll amalgamate with gold jewelry, if I recall. I'm old enough to have played with Hg bare handed as a kid. Its kind of like gunpowder, respect it and you'll be safe, make a habit in your life of doing dumb things and nothing is ever safe.
In other words, the British spelling was just a matter of British cultural hegemony at the time, just as American spellings are matters of American cultural hegemony today.
http://www.worldwidewords.org/articles/aluminium.htm
I didn't know any of this until just now.
"Sir Humphry made a bit of a mess of naming this new element, at first spelling it alumium (this was in 1807) then changing it to aluminum, and finally settling on aluminium in 1812."
To me it reads that British academics (Sir Humphry's peers) prefered the -ium spelling. It doesn't say they used political pressure to force him to change it.
While the use of both spellings were in almost equal use in the general British and US populations for a long time, the article hypothesises that the -um spelling became dominant in the US because of Webster's -um entry.
Steel is easy to weld (depends on type, but generally) Aluminum is harder Titanium is even harder. It reacts with nitrogen.
Steel is relatively easy to machine Aluminum can be even easier. Titanium is very hard.
Sounds like there might be some roadblocks on wide spread adoption of titanium still, even if the raw material gets cheaper.
The SR-71 was largely constructed out of titanium since the whole airframe heated up to high temperatures in high speed flight. The maintenance facilities had welding stations that had nitrogenless atmospheres under a "bubble".
Mechanical engineer here. This depends heavily on the alloy you're dealing with. Many Aluminum alloys are so soft that they'll actually melt and subsequently bond to the tool surface when they're being cut/ground/sanded/etc.
Also Aluminum tends to have a very low shear strength which means it won't hold a thread the way most steels will - this is why you typically see rivets in aircraft skin.
Indeed, there is a growing industry for manufacturing
industrial sapphires the size of a large bucket, suitable
for use in bullet-proof glass, aeroplane windows and soon
- unscratchable smartphone displays.
Sheesh! With the above post the state of spelling on the Internet reaches a new low.
http://dsc.discovery.com/tv-shows/mythbusters/videos/hindenb...
You can buy optical flats COTS from the usual optics suppliers. You won't like the price, like $100/square inch.
Maybe a decade after the star trek movie with the whales, I almost got a chance to make a very small fish tank out of transparent aluminum, just like in the movie, using broken supermarket scanner windows. Then they found out how much money they could get by reselling the windows, and my free source dried up before I could make the tank. I was assuming standard aquarium silicone would stick to sapphire just as well as it sticks to glass... anyone out there ever get to try it?
My phone was damaged and I wondered if my keys scratched my SG3 smartphone, Gorilla Glass has a hardness from what I have read anywhere from a 3 to a 6 but corundum (oxidized aluminum) has a Mohs hardness of 9. Then I found out scratch resistance is not hardness. I think the SG3 screen's scratch resistance is significantly inferior to the SG2 screen.
With continued recycling [over a long period of time] there is concern that alloys will converge upon a final aluminum alloy and we will no longer be able to create new application specific alloys.
http://www.macrumors.com/2013/11/04/apple-to-build-new-700-e...
http://www.macrumors.com/2013/11/12/apples-new-manufacturing...
Make that the 5S’ home button/TouchID sensor. Plus the outermost element of the rear camera lens is rather sensibly sapphire, IIRC.
http://news.discovery.com/tech/nanoaluminum-rocket-fuel.html
>Novelis has seen a 25% increase in demand from the motor industry in the last year, most of it coming from one of its biggest customers, Jaguar Land Rover, which has just begun manufacturing Range Rovers with aluminium.
>Currently, Novelis obtains almost 50% of its aluminium used to make a new Range Rover from junk - empty cans, scrapped vehicles, demolition sites - and it aims to raise that to 80% by 2020.
It makes a lot of sens, if you ask me.
1) Less than a Range Rover made of aluminum which came straight from bauxite? Assumedly the answer is yes, otherwise the motivation for recycling would be unclear.
2) Less than a Range Rover made conventionally, that is, out of steel? Very unlikely, steel is really, really cheap.
-- Jára da Cimrman