Aluminium: The metal that just keeps on giving

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-25020651

by Nux • 13 years ago

131 70 13 years ago

bbc.co.uk

pstuart• 13 years ago

Next up should be titanium: http://www.defensenews.com/article/20110720/DEFSECT04/107200...

sjwright• 13 years ago

Or as Americans like to call it, Titanum.

e1l1• 13 years ago

Ha. No, we don't, but I guess we should.

Lagged2Death• 13 years ago

Did you know that "Aluminum" was the discoverer's own spelling, and was actually used in Britain soon after the naming? "Aluminium" was an arbitrary revision made because influential people just liked it better.

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.

yaddayadda• 13 years ago

No, we don't. Nor should we.

philwelch• 13 years ago

Or as British like to call it, "Titaninium".

Gravityloss• 13 years ago

"the cost of titanium will drop by a factor of two to five"

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".

na85• 13 years ago

Steel is relatively easy to machine Aluminum can be even easier.

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.

znowi• 13 years ago

Would the recycled aluminium Range Rover cost less?

bnegreve• 13 years ago

It seems that they already are. From the article:

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.

Scramblejams• 13 years ago

The question is, would the recycled aluminum (I'm in the US) Range Rover cost less than what?

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.

happycube• 13 years ago

That Sapphire iPhone glass sure seems a lot like Transparent Aluminum, now... "hello, iPhone"

Samuel_Michon3• 13 years ago

The iPhone display is covered by Corning’s Gorilla Glass (not sapphire). The iPhone 4S’ TouchID sensor (the home button) is covered by a small synthetic sapphire pane. However, given Apple’s substantial investment in GT Advanced, the company might use sapphire for larger panes in the future.

http://www.macrumors.com/2013/11/04/apple-to-build-new-700-e...

http://www.macrumors.com/2013/11/12/apples-new-manufacturing...

Samuel_Michon3• 13 years ago

/u/aivaomo is hellbanned, but here is his reply to my earlier comment:

Make that the 5S’ home button/TouchID sensor. Plus the outermost element of the rear camera lens is rather sensibly sapphire, IIRC.

veganarchocap• 13 years ago

Good guy Aluminium.

js2• 13 years ago

Just don't spill any mercury on it.

http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2004-09/amazing-rustin...

bsimpson2• 13 years ago

After reading both your article and the OP, I'm very keen to see a video of mercury spilled on sapphire.

huggah• 13 years ago

Good question. I'm not sure, but I suspect it shouldn't do anything interesting; mercury allows oxygen to move through the otherwise impermeable aluminium oxide crust and "rust" the metal.

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).

thaumasiotes2• 13 years ago

Well, sapphire is quite easy to obtain, and I believe that's also true of mercury. I'd be a little hesitant to expose mercury to the air near myself, though. :/

If you know how to do it safely，go for it!

armenarmen• 13 years ago

BAM! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7Ilxsu-JlY

mchannon• 13 years ago

The spelling with more legitimacy is Aluminum.

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.

grecy• 13 years ago

citation needed

Wikipedia seems to have a different story that you.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium#Etymology

001sky• 13 years ago

The earliest citation given in the Oxford English Dictionary for any word used as a name for this element is alumium, which British chemist and inventor Humphry Davy employed in 1808 for the metal he was trying to isolate electrolytically from the mineral alumina. The citation is from the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London: "Had I been so fortunate as to have obtained more certain evidences on this subject, and to have procured the metallic substances I was in search of, I should have proposed for them the names of silicium, alumium, zirconium, and glucium."[67][68]

Davy settled on aluminum by the time he published his 1812 book Chemical Philosophy

== The main point of context.

andyjohnson0• 13 years ago

Depends where you live. The article is on bbc.co.uk and Aluminium is the usual spelling used in the UK.

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]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium#Etymology

dsowers• 13 years ago

Thank you for this explanation. I'm always telling people the same thing. We should respect the name which the discoverer gave to it.

GunlogAlm• 13 years ago

We should respect the name which the discoverer gave to it. Why?

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.

bhrgunatha• 13 years ago

As a mark of respect, I agree. However languages don't work that way. I've changed my stance over the years to whatever works in the name of communication. Language is fluid so our attitude needs to be fluid too.

VLM3• 13 years ago

Counterexample, Scheelium lightbulbs (aka wolfram aka tungsten).

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.

rickdale• 13 years ago

Sir Humphrey Davy first used the word aluminia but Charles Marting Hall was the first person to come up with an inexpensive way to produce aluminum, which is what brought the metal in to wide spread commercial use.[1]

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Martin_Hall

orbitingpluto• 13 years ago

Don't mention Hall without Héroult.

Apparently that's the equivalent of saying Newton invented calculus w/o mentioning Leibniz.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hall-H%C3%A9roult_process

rdtsc• 13 years ago

Sir Humphrey Davy, its discoverer, called it Aluminum when he published his work Chemical Philosophy in 1812.

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.

product50• 13 years ago

But we call "Titanium" Titanium - and not Titanum.

paul_f• 13 years ago

Likewise, it is spelled Unobtainium, bot Unobtainum

drjesusphd• 13 years ago

I've only ever heard Aluminium used in the UK, not the US.

macman• 13 years ago

What do the Canadans say?

kyro• 13 years ago

_ofdw2• 13 years ago

Our vocab is usually a mix of US (we're next door) and UK (Commonwealth represent) but in this case most of us use the American "aluminum".

epo• 13 years ago

The IUPAC standard name is aluminium, aluminum is listed as a variant (but only at the insistence of Americans I'd bet). What we mock is the pretentiousness of claims like "more legitimacy". Insecure, much?

rasur2• 13 years ago

I've always liked Aluminium in a powdered form and mixed with iron oxide in the correct proportion: Thermite :D

zimbu668• 13 years ago

Make sure you know what you're doing. This happened in the apartment building we were living in last year: http://www.denverpost.com/kiszla/ci_20952038/apartment-fire-...

rasur2• 13 years ago

Thanks! As far as I'm concerned, Thermite is a wide-open-spaces/designated area, no-children-or-small-animals kind of substance. Definitely not for home use (well, unless your objective is to burn the house down..).

fzltrp• 13 years ago

Even storage of the metal may bring benefits: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/21/business/a-shuffle-of-alum....

Swannie• 13 years ago

Wow. Learned a lot from the linked shared here. Thanks.

lifeisstillgood• 13 years ago

  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.

seriously - Transparent Aluminum :-)

venomsnake• 13 years ago

Plain old corundum - you can get pieces of it the size of your fist if you see what is left after welding railroad tracks with termite.

willdonie• 13 years ago

"... welding railroad tracks with _termite_."

Sheesh! With the above post the state of spelling on the Internet reaches a new low.

VLM3• 13 years ago

stereotypically used in supermarket laser barcode scanner windows. Pretty much indestructible.

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?

dhughes• 13 years ago

A PBS show on a few nights ago had a history of aluminum and its uses. In the show it mentioned aluminum is too soft when pure so copper was added but the discoverer found even after copper was added it was still too soft, he got fed up went away for a few days and when he came back the alloy was harder; age hardening.

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.

gngeal• 13 years ago

"Budoucnost patří aluminiu!"

-- Jára da Cimrman

lancewiggs2• 13 years ago

I've worked in aluminium smelters. Three interesting things:

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.

randomafrican• 13 years ago

Iceland !

caf• 13 years ago

(geothermal)

bigiain• 13 years ago

I've heard Alimin(i)um referred to as "frozen electricity" and "solid electricity" - the real "value" in Al ingots is based on the electricity required to separate it from the oxygen in bauxite.

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…

mkingston2• 13 years ago

I knew I recognised your user name (maybe the fact you mentioned NZ first triggered something in my mind). Quite off topic, but you may be able to answer this: do you have any idea whether shutting down Tiwai Point would indeed affect NZ electricity prices significantly? It's kind of moot now (ugh), but I'm curious.

lancewiggs2• 13 years ago

It would release demand (15% of total) back to the market, so yes it would. It would also reduce our CO2 emissions, lose jobs from an area that needs them and reduce GDP from exporting that Aluminium and increase profits for the newly sold-down electricity companies. And so on. It's all quite complex but a good analysis should show the net gain or loss. But my take is that the plant can be a lot more efficient.

Stochasticity• 13 years ago

While it's true that there a wide number of applications, and Aluminum is theoretically perpetually recyclable, there is still a small problem. When an alloy is formed and elements added to pure Al they are exceptionally difficult to remove. This means that for alloy-specific applications the recycled 'aluminum' must have extra elements added to create the alloy desired.

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.

tdj• 13 years ago

I'm surprise no-one mentioned ALICE - aluminium + ice (water). A paste-like substance that's quite a powerful rocket propellant.

http://news.discovery.com/tech/nanoaluminum-rocket-fuel.html

Aluminium: The metal that just keeps on giving

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