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Example research essay topic: Hall Heroult Process Bauxite Mined Aluminum - 1,057 words

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... s, and soils contain aluminum compounds, but aluminum can be made inexpensively only from bauxite. Bauxite is the name for any ore that has a large amount of aluminum hydroxide- a chemical combination of aluminum oxide and water. Aluminum oxide, also called alumina, is the compound from which aluminum is made. Most bauxite consists of 30 to 60 percent alumina and 12 to 30 percent water. It also contains iron oxide, silica, and titanium oxide.

The color of bauxite depends chiefly on how much iron oxide the ore contains. The more iron oxide it has, the darker the color. Bauxite may be white, cream, gray, pink, yellow, red, or brown. Most bauxite is as hard a s rock, but some is as soft as clay. The richest deposits of bauxite lie in tropical and near-tropical regions. The leading bauxite-mining countries include Australia, Guinea, Jamaica, and Brazil.

About 85 percent of the bauxite mined in the United States comes from Arkansas. The remainder comes chiefly from Alabama and Georgia. Canada has no bauxite deposits. Most bauxite deposits lie near the surface of the earth and are mined by the open-pit method. In this process, bulldozers and other earthmoving machines first clear away the overburden- the soil, rocks, and trees that cover the deposits. Next, the ore is blasted loose by means of explosives.

Huge power shovels then scoop up the bauxite, and trucks or railroad cars carry it to a processing plant. At the processing plant, the bauxite is crushed and then washed to remove clay and dirt. Some of the water in the bauxite is removed by drying to ore in kilns. The bauxite is then ground into a powder and shipped to a refining plant, where it will be made into aluminum. The word aluminum comes from the term allen.

Allen is the Latin word for alum, a group of aluminum compounds that occur in nature and which ancient peoples used in dyeing textiles. In 1746, Johann Heinrich Pott, a Prussian chemist, prepared alumina from alum. Scientists believed that alumina was a chemical compound that consisted of oxygen and an unknown metal. The British chemist Sir Humphry Davy called this metal aluminum and later changed the name to aluminum. In 1809, Davy formed an alloy of aluminum and iron by electrically melting alumina with iron. In 1825, Hans Christian Oersted, a Danish chemist and physicist, produced the first aluminum.

Oersted prepared aluminum chloride form alumina. He then heated the aluminum chloride with an alloy of potassium and mercury, and a small lump of aluminum formed in the alloy. In 1827, Friedrich Wohler, a German chemist, produced aluminum in the form of a gray powder by heating aluminum chloride with potassium. In 1845, he produced particles large enough to be weighed. Wohler discovered that aluminum was lightweight, and he was the first scientist to describe many of the other properties of aluminum. In 1854, Henri Etienne Sainte-Claire Deville, a French chemist, improved on Wohler's method.

Deville used sodium instead of potassium to break down aluminum chloride. This process produced larger quantities of aluminum. Commercial aluminum plants using Deville's method soon opened in France. The price of aluminum dropped from $ 115 a pound in 1855 to $ 17 a pound in 1859. However, it was still too costly for widespread use. The growth of the aluminum industry increased greatly following two important developments in the 1880 s.

They were the invention of the Hall-Heroult process and of the Bayer process. In 1886, two scientists - Charles Martin Hall of the United States and Paul L. T. Heroult of France - developed an inexpensive way to make aluminum.

Neither man knew that the other was working on the problem. However, each thought of dissolving alumina in the mineral cryolite and separating aluminum from the mixture by electrolytic reduction. Today, the Hall-Heroult process is used to produce nearly all the worlds aluminum. Aluminum production soared during World War I as the fighting nations increased output to help fill their military needs.

During the 1920 s, the development of new aluminum alloys and of improved methods of turning aluminum into useful products continued to boost production. The Great Depression of the 1930 s cut world aluminum output almost in half. But the start of World War II brought tremendous expansion in production. In 1941, Reynolds Metals Company became the second producer of primary aluminum in the United States. The demand for aluminum has grown steadily with the continuing development of new uses for the metal. Aluminum is used in solar-heating systems that absorb the suns rays to heat houses and other buildings.

The production of aluminum by electrolytic reduction requires an enormous amount of electricity. To help conserve energy, the aluminum industry has stepped up efforts to recycle aluminum cans and other scrap. Remelting scrap to produce new aluminum takes less than 5 percent of the energy needed to make the metal from bauxite. Recycling also saves bauxite.

The world has enough bauxite to last from 200 to 300 years. About 75 percent of the deposits lie in countries that belong to the International Bauxite Association. This association was formed in 1974 to increase revenues from bauxite mining among the member countries. The IBA nations have established prices on ore they export and have raised taxes on bauxite mined in their countries by foreign firms.

Partly because of actions taken by the IBA, the U. S. aluminum industry is working to develop inexpensive methods for obtaining alumina from other materials. These materials include various clays; such ores as alunite, anorthosite, dawson ite, and nepheline senate; and wastes from coal mining.

Alunite and nepheline senate have been used to reproduce alumina commercially in Russia. Aluminum, one of the most common and most commercially produced metals, greatly affects the world we live in today. Without aluminum, we wouldnt have many of the things we use everyday, like pop cans, cookware, or refrigerators. The world would not be able to function without aluminum do to its dependency on it for electrical and transportation equipment.

It has revolutionized the automobile and plane industry, as well as made our lives easier with the simple foil we use for storing and cooking food. Overall, aluminum has influenced our lives greatly and continues to be a major contribution as we enter the new millenium. Bibliography: N/A


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