Aluminum is very abundant within the Earth’s crust yet most products are very expensive that are made of it i.e. airplane parts, bike frames, car parts etc. Yet drinks are packaged in this ‘expensive’ material. Why not something cheaper? Why is it so expensive?..mining?..hard to work with?
Explain.
don’t know how it would help you persay, but aluminum is somewhat difficult to handle. In my youthful (yeah, like I’m so mature now) destructive chemistry experiements I attempted to grind up aluminum into powder for use in the oh so popular thermite. However this is most difficult seeing as how it is not magnetic and somewhat brittle in flaky powder form.
The only thing a nonconformist hates more than a conformist is another nonconformist who does not conform to the prevailing standards of nonconformity.
http://www.uscar.org/techno/alumcost.htm
General discussion of new tech. in auto industry.
http://www.tms.org/pubs/journals/JOM/9711/Ejiofor-9711
Much more detail, aluminum in general.
Now hopefully got the links right
That second link should be:
http://www.tms.org/pubs/journals/JOM/9711/Ejiofor-9711.html
Aluminum is expensive not because it’s hard to find but because it’s hard to refine. You don’t find Al in its pure form so you have to zap it and distill it and filter it… All of which takes a lot of electricty and time.
AFAIK Al is used in cans cause it’s easy to recycle.
Aluminium is certainly difficult to handle and a huge current is required to electrolyse the molten ore (bauxite)…I think this is why aluminium smelters are often situated close to hydro-electric plants. I refuse to believe though, that aluminium is distilled, it has a boiling point of some 2500 degress celsius…even at low pressure, surely this would be almost an impossibility. And what is it distilled in? A diamond vessel?
Very tersely, it can be said they are seperated by a big electrical zap 
- You take a shitload of crushed bauxite (red dirt), mix it with hot NaOH (aka caustic soda), thus pulling out the Al[sub]2[/sub]O[sub]3[/sub][sup].[/sup]XH[sub]2[/sub]
- Now you filter/decant to get the rest of the crap out and you’re left with the Aluminum oxide hydrate
- Send the hydrate into a “precipitator” where it crystallizes, and then subject it to extremely high temperatures to get the water out, thus leaving you with Aluminum oxide(aka alumina , a white powder)
- Now you take that powder in a solution with a molten electrolyte (mostly cryolite), in a big carbon-lined steel pot. The bottom of the pot acts like a cathode (- charge) and carbon blocks are lowered in as the anode (+ charge). The electricity flowing through causes the oxygen to react with the carbon anode to form CO[sub]2[/sub] while the heavier aluminum settles to teh bottom of the pot to be siphoned off.
- After that the aluminum is traditionally treated to assure purity and cleanliness and alloyed with other metals in some cases for various desired uses.
On average, it takes about 4 parts of bauxite to get 2 parts of alumina hydrate to get 1 part aluminum.
P.S. if the subscript on my chemical compounds didn’t come out right, my appologies. I’m just now experimenting with such things
The only thing a nonconformist hates more than a conformist is another nonconformist who does not conform to the prevailing standards of nonconformity.
Though it should be obvious upon further reading, the compound should be Al[sub]2[/sub]O[sub]3[/sub][sup].[/sup]H[sub]2[/sub]O
The only thing a nonconformist hates more than a conformist is another nonconformist who does not conform to the prevailing standards of nonconformity.
oh geez…I fumbled it again…there should be an “X” in front of the H2O in the hydrate, denoting the fact that I didn’t want to go to the trouble of finding out exactly how many moles of water there are per mole of the compound. oops. don’t shoot me
The only thing a nonconformist hates more than a conformist is another nonconformist who does not conform to the prevailing standards of nonconformity.
Someone will correct me if I am wrong, but isnt the reason those car parts and such are expensive also due to that most are aluminum alloys? Such as magnesium and other metals? I dont know my metals that well but it was a thought.
GasDr asks:
Aluminum, per se is inexpensive (it’s difficult to refine, yes, but assuming that you have gigawatt-hours of electricity at your disposal, it’s fairly easy to convert mountains of bauxite to rivers of molten aluminum). The difficulty comes in working it. This is less due to the recalcitrance of the raw material than it is to the fact that there’s a human being in the circuit, who usually insists on being paid a living wage.
“Kings die, and leave their crowns to their sons. Shmuel HaKatan took all the treasures in the world, and went away.”
Prior to the development of large-scale methods for refining aluminum it was tremendously expensive. So much so that at the very top of the Washington monument is a little pyramid made of, you guessed it, aluminum. It was thought fitting to honor our first president because it was, at the time, a precious metal.
Nowadays aluminum is remarkably inexpensive. It is only costly in comparison to iron or steel. Most other metals cost more than aluminum does – especially exotic metals like titanium or magnesium.
Back in my mechanical engineering days there were two reasons to use aluminum rather than steel, both weight related. Aluminum is about as strong as steel, pound for pound, but it weighs a great deal less. Therefore you have to use a lot more aluminum to get the same strength – and since it costs more (IIRC, it was about eight times as much) you would usually use steel. But if a part had to be a certain size for reasons other than strength and it was important to save weight, aluminum was a good substitute. Generally there would have to be some economic offset to justify the additional cost. The other reason was if the part was something that a mechanic was going to have to lift and hold in place (like the transmission oil pan on my Ford pickup) you’d use aluminum to save the poor guy’s arms and shoulders.
Besides strength/weight considerations aluminum is, of course, a better conductor of heat and electricity, and it doesn’t tarnish. (Well, technically it doesn’t keep tarnishing. New aluminum almost immediately forms a thin, transparent layer of oxide on its surface, but it doesn’t penetrate any deeper, like rust does on iron.)
Strangers have the best candy.
Android: Of course it’s not distilled. It’s not just zapped either.
That was a joke. You will find it funny or bad things will happen to parakeet.
I feel the urge to resurrect this thread for my own nefarious purposes.
pluto wrote:
How expensive was aluminum, say, two centuries ago? Was it more expensive than silver? More expensive than gold? Did any countries mint aluminum coins instead of gold coins? And when did the refining methods finally drive the price down?
I ask because I remember hearing 'waaaaay back in my school days about these really really expensive “aluminum servingware sets”, and I wanted to know just how precious of a precious metal aluminum was considered.
I always wondered why bike frames were so damned expensive, too. I wonder why nobody has come up with a fiberglass frame- too brittle? Lightweight frames are nice in that I can breeze along at speeds upwards of 45 mph; which may not sound that fast unless you drive a Ford Escort.
Fools read Dear Abby, Simpletons read Anne Landers… it’s a fine line.
Here you go. All you wanted to know about the beginning of the aluminum and the cartel that developed.
http://www-geology.ucdavis.edu/~GEL115/aluminum.html
opus,
WAG, but I’d think a fibreglas bike frame would be heavier than aluminum. WAG, but the frame would probably have to be more massive if it were made of fibreglas because the glass isn’t as strong as aluminum. As I said, just guessing.
There some really lightweight and expensive carbon fiber bike frames out there.
tracer asks:
Two centuries ago aluminum was incredibly expensive, as it didn’t exist in metallic form, and thus all the wealth of Ormus and of Ind couldn’t buy a single gram of it. It was first isolated, I think, by Oersted in 1825, by expensive processes, and was thus considered a precious metal (because of the amount of money that had to be poured into getting it, rather than because of its natural rarity).
In addition to the cap of the Washington Monument, I believe that the crown of Napoleon III was also made of aluminum.
Charles Hall invented the (what else?) Hall process in 1886, which made aluminum refining fairly inexpensive (assuming that one has vast amounts of electricity at one’s disposal). That was when the price began plumetting.
Pure aluminum, incidentally, is too soft to be useful; “aluminum” items are usually alloyed with zinc (for home use) or manganese (for industrial use).
It is often said that “anything is possible”. In fact, very few things are possible, and most of them have already happened.
Nothing to do with aluminum, this is about fiberglass frames.
They make composite frames, some of which include fiberglass as well as carbon fiber and other stuff. They had one at the local bike shop called a Kestrel. It was several thousand dollars, but only weighed 3 or 4 pounds. Pretty amazing. The reason given for the cost was that the composite has to be hand made and the process is rather lengthy. Also it was at that time fairly new technology, so it was somewhat of a boutique item, bought mainly by rich kids (of all ages) as showpiece (“My bike is cooler than yours, nya nya”). That was a while ago so things may have changed.
VW used to make the engines from it.
In the USA there was so many cans left around that we now get paid to recycle them. This keeps the price kinda high because they have to pay us.
funneefarmer, what no links on this board? I think its been covered lots before.