Aluminum (spelled and pronounced aluminium outside of North America) is the 13th element on the periodic table and one of the most abundant metals on the planet. Aluminum is frequently used to produce consumer goods and building materials, but its many useful physical properties make it suitable for a wide range of applications.
In our guide to Aluminum 101, we will cover:
Why Use Aluminum?
Aluminum is abundant, strong, temperature resistant, malleable, inexpensive, corrosion resistant, recyclable, lightweight, conductive, and reflective.
When alloyed with other elements, no other metal can compare to aluminum’s versatility, making it one of the most important metals in the world.
Aluminum vs. Aluminum Alloy
Although aluminum is a natural element, you won’t stumble across any aluminum sheets in the wild. Hydrated alumina, also known as bauxite ore, is mined from the Earth's crust and refined to extract aluminum. Most aluminum you come in contact with is not pure aluminum, as 100% aluminum is too soft for commercial use.
Alloys are made by combining two or more metallic elements. Aluminum is usually combined with alloying metals like copper, magnesium, silicon, manganese, zinc or tin to create aluminum alloy. These metals increase aluminum’s strength, resistance to corrosion, and electrical conductivity.
Aluminum Manufacturing Methods
There are two primary processes for shaping aluminum: extrusion and drawing.
Drawn Aluminum
In the drawn aluminum tubing process, aluminum is pulled or drawn into a stamping machine’s die cavity. It then undergoes plastic deformation, which stretches aluminum into the shape desired. Drawn aluminum is used to create circular products like tubes, cans and pots.
Extruded Aluminum
In the extruded aluminum process, the metal is heated until soft but not liquid. It is then pushed or extruded through a dye to the desired shape, cut, and then allowed to cool and harden.
Aluminium Properties
After oxygen and silicon, aluminum is the most bountiful element on Earth. It’s also the second-most used metal worldwide, after iron. Here are some of aluminum’s many useful qualities.
Strong
While aluminum is one of the lightest metals, aluminum alloys are strong and durable, lending themselves to applications ranging from household appliances to construction framing and spacecraft.
Temperature Resistant
Aluminum performs well in cold weather, as its strength actually increases in lower temperatures. In contrast, steel becomes brittle as temperatures drop.
Malleable
Aluminum’s malleability enables it to be deformed by extrusion, drawing, or rolling processes without failure, lending it to many uses.
Corrosion Resistant
A thin aluminum oxide layer (aluminum and oxygen, bonded together) forms on aluminum’s surface when it’s exposed to air, creating a rust- and corrosion-resistant shield.
Recyclable
New aluminum production is energy-intensive and time-consuming. Fortunately, aluminum has a low melting point, is easily reused and 100% recyclable. It’s one of the few materials that is cheaper to recycle than create, and without degradation.
Lightweight
Aluminum is about one-third as dense as copper or steel, making it one of the lightest metals available commercially. Its strength-to-weight ratio makes it an invaluable material for many industries, specifically transportation.
Conductive
Electrical:
Aluminum’s electrical conductivity makes it an excellent material for electrical transmission lines. Aluminum is less expensive and lighter than copper, enabling it to conduct twice as much electricity pound for pound. In addition, aluminum pipes make effective, low-cost conduits for electrical wiring.
Heat:
Aluminum has great thermal conductivity and is also non-toxic, making it a common material for kitchenware and cooking utensils.
Reflective
Aluminum forms a highly reflective coating for both heat and light, as it doesn’t deteriorate like silver coatings do. Reflective aluminum coatings have many uses, including light fixtures, insulation materials, telescope mirrors and toys.
How is Aluminum Used?
Here are some popular ways aluminum can be used commercially.
Retail
Retail businesses benefit from aluminum displays and fixtures, which are lightweight yet sturdy. Examples of aluminum in retail include slatwall for product displays, price tag molding and frames for storewide signage. A variety of custom extrusions can be created for retail usage including clothing, grocery, home improvement and sporting goods stores.
Architecture and Décor
Aluminum’s corrosion resistance makes it a great choice for outdoor handrails and siding and trim on houses and buildings. Aluminum sheeting is often used on residential decor and design projects.
Construction
Aluminum is at the core of many high-rise buildings and construction projects due to its durability, design flexibility, energy saving qualities and corrosion resistance. Its low weight class also eliminates the need for heavy-weight bearing foundations and makes it easy to work with.
In addition, aluminum frames are a cost-effective option for offices and homes. Aluminum window frames are less expensive and lower maintenance than wood, being that they’re more resistant to cracking in low temperatures and aren’t tempting to termites.
Consumer Goods
Consumer electronics like smartphones, flat screen TVs, tablets, laptops and computer monitors are increasingly being produced with aluminum over steel and plastic. Aluminum’s heat conductivity keeps electronics cool while its strength and durability protects delicate components.
Other consumer goods made of aluminum include furniture, picture frames, pots and pans, canned goods and of course, aluminum foil.
Household Appliances
Due to their excellent heating and cooling tolerance, aluminum is used in many household appliances, including:
Transportation
Aluminum has many uses in the transportation industry due to its outstanding strength-to-weight ratio that results in greater fuel efficiency and consequently, a reduction in CO2 emissions.
Cars
Automobile manufacturers are increasingly turning to aluminum as they become more environmentally conscious and interested in creating more fuel-efficient vehicles. Lighter cars use less fuel (of any kind) and produce fewer emissions. Additionally, cars made with aluminum are more easily recycled, making them more eco-friendly.
Trains and Ships
Aluminum’s light weight and strength enable more goods and fuel to be loaded on commercial ships of all kinds, from tankers to cruise ships and recreational boats and underwater craft.
Aluminum alloys also make high-speed trains possible, as their lighter weights enable greater speeds and better fuel economy. Corrosion resistance also improves maintenance requirements, reducing operating costs.
Aircraft and Spacecraft
Using aluminum in aircraft construction offers more passenger and storage capacity at a fraction of the weight of steel. In addition, its corrosion resistance increases aircraft safety.
NASA’s usage of aluminum-lithium alloys has contributed greatly to rocket and spacecraft technology, easing weight and fuel consumption.
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How would you react if someone told you they would trade you a piece of gold for that old soda can you had hanging out in the back of the fridge?
You would probably have a good laugh, right? Well, jump back a couple of hundred years to the early nineteenth century, and the aluminum contained in that soda can of yours was once considered one of the most precious metals in the world (yes, even more so than gold)!
Flash forward to today, however, and that seems pretty wild, considering aluminum is practically everywhere we go. Now considered the most widely used "non-ferrous metal" in the world, aluminum's production and application exceeds all other metals except for iron and steel.
Yet, for being the most common metal in the Earth's crust, the second most popular metal in the world, and the third most abundant element on our planet, knowledge about this widely-used metal is pretty scarce.
So, exactly what is aluminum? And why is it so important?
What is A
luminum
?
Unless you're a chemist with access to a laboratory-controlled environment, the likelihood of you interacting with "pure aluminum" is slim to none. This is due to high aluminum reactivity, as the pure aluminum metal's chemical properties are highly reactive to oxygen, causing it to cling to oxygen atoms immediately upon contact. Talk about some serious chemistry 🧪! The result is the formation of a substance known as hydrated alumina.
Hydrated alumina, better known as bauxite ore, is mined from the Earth's crust and refined to extract aluminum. Once extracted from the bauxite, pure aluminum is often much too soft and ductile for commercial use.
For this reason, pure aluminum is almost always combined with other alloying metals or elements. These commonly include copper, magnesium, manganese, silicon, tin, and/or zinc. By creating an aluminum metal alloy, the overall strength of the metal is improved, as well as many other varying physical properties necessary for application.
So when you encounter daily objects in your life such as aluminum cans, cooking foil, or food packaging, just remember you are not actually coming in contact with pure aluminum, but rather aluminum alloys that are only made up of 90 to 99% aluminum metal.
How is Aluminum Made?
By now, you know that aluminum is not naturally found in its pure form. Instead, compounds of aluminum exist within rocky lumps of ore buried in the Earth's crust. This ore, as previously mentioned, is called bauxite, and it is the world's main source of pure aluminum.
To extract aluminum from bauxite and begin making useful items out of it (like the foil you use to cover your mother's delicious leftovers), there are two major processes involved: the first is the Bayer Process (1886), and the second is the Hall–Héroult Process(1889).
1. Bayer Process: Since bauxite is made up of aluminum oxide, water molecules and a number of impurities, the water and impurities must first be removed. Raw bauxite is mined and then crushed, blended, ground, and turned into a slurry. This slurry is then treated with heat and pressure to purify the bauxite residue and leave behind just the aluminum oxide.
2. Hall–Héroult Process: the aluminum oxide (known as alumina) left behind then undergoes a smelting process that requires an extremely high amount of energy. The aluminum oxide is put into a molten mixture and electrolyzed so the aluminum atoms will split from oxygen atoms. In turn, this produces metallic aluminum. The raw aluminum is then cast into aluminum billets/ingots for alloying and further processing.
Aluminum production may not seem that difficult on the surface, but that is far from the truth. That is why the recycling process has become so important. Extracting and producing aluminum that is used in our society is a difficult, time-consuming and energy-intensive process. Thankfully, recycling makes aluminum sheet metal easily recoverable, taking only 5% of the energy that was required to extract it originally.
Types of Aluminum
Hypothetically, say you extracted some really nice raw aluminum and found yourself left with a shiny billet. What do you do now? Melt that sucker down and alloy it, that's what!
Pure aluminum is extremely soft and often not strong enough for most commercial uses and projects. In order to fix this, pure aluminum is melted down and mixed with other elements such as iron, silicon, copper, magnesium, manganese and zinc. By alloying with these other elements, aluminum's properties such as strength, density, workability, electrical conductivity and corrosion resistance are enhanced.
During the aluminum alloying process, three different types of aluminum alloys can be produced depending on their attributes and what methods are used to treat them: commercially pure, heat-treatable, and non-heat-treatable.
Each type of aluminum alloy can then be further subdivided and characterized by its main alloying element. This is done by assigning each type of alloy a four-digit number to help classify it, where the first digit identifies a general class (or series).
1. Commercially Pure Aluminum: alloys comprised of aluminum 99% or higher purity.
- 1xxx Series:
has excellent corrosion resistance, excellent workability, as well as high thermal and electrical conductivity. This series is commonly used for transmission lines that connect national grids across the U.S.
2. Heat Treatable Aluminum: alloys that are strengthened through an extreme heating and cooling process. Alloys are heated to specific points to evenly distribute the elements within and then quenched (rapidly cooled) to freeze them in place.
3. Non-Heat Treatable Aluminum: alloys that are strengthened through a process known as cold-working. This process occurs by "working" the metal during its rolling or forging stages and building up dislocations in the metal's atomic structure to increase its strength.
- 3xxx Series: Manganese is the principal alloying element, often with small amounts of magnesium added. These alloys have moderate strength and good workability. Often are used for aluminum beverage cans and cooking utensils.
- 4xxx Series: Silicon is the main alloying element. These alloys produce lower melting points without producing brittleness. Often are used for welding wires and structural applications.
- 5xxx Series: Magnesium is the primary alloying element. These alloys have moderate to high strength, good weldability, and corrosion resistance in aquatic environments. Often are used in building construction and marine applications.
Facts We Bet You Won't Forget
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Did you know that aluminum is a metal that's actually lighter than air? That's why it's used in many things, like foil, airplane parts, and even balloons. So next time you're holding a piece of aluminum foil, just remember: you're holding something lighter than air.
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Aluminum is that it's one of the few elements that are able to float on water. So if you're ever stuck on a deserted island and need a raft, just find some aluminum cans, and you're good to go! Of course, you might want to bring some other essentials too, but the aluminum raft will be a great start.
Why Use Aluminum?
By now, you should have a solid idea of what aluminum is and how it's made, but here comes the big question: why do we use it?
Aluminum is abundant, inexpensive, lightweight, ductile, durable, malleable, conductive, and the list goes on. One of the biggest characteristics that set aluminum apart, though, is its variability.
No other metal can compare to aluminum when it comes to the variety of uses it has when alloyed with other elements. In addition, aluminum is indefinitely recyclable and is one of the only materials in the world that pays for the cost of its own collection.
Combining its sustainability with its versatility makes aluminum metal not only one of the most important metals in the world but also one of the most utilized across countless industries.
From the depths of outer space to the bottom of the ocean, aluminum is everywhere and contributes to both the development of our society and the betterment of our lives.
If it turns out that this wasn't everything you wanted to know and more, check out the Boyd Metals Blog page for more interesting info about the metals industry, and don't forget to check out our FREE Digital Stock Book for all your processing needs by clicking on the image below. Our indexed and searchable PDF makes it easy to quickly locate the information you need.
What's Inside?
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Image Sources:
1 http://muharraq27.blogspot.com/2010/12/aluminium-processing.html
2 https://recyclenation.com/2014/03/recycle-aluminum/
3 https://www.lightmetalage.com/news/industry-news/recycling-remelt/hydro-starts-new-recycling-line/
4 https://www.indiamart.com/cmeri-durgapur-durgapur/