Aluminium - Enriching A Billion Lives

Aluminium is used excessively in the modern world with extremely diverse due to its several unusual combinations of attributes. No other metallic element can be used in so many ways across such a variety of domains like in the home, in transport, on land, sea and in air, and in industry and commerce. Aluminium's usages are not always as obvious as they may seem, with sizeable proportions of manufactured aluminium and aluminium oxide going into other separate processes, like the manufacture of glass, rather than towards the common consumer products that we most readily associate Aluminium with.  Over 95% of the Alumina manufactured globally is derived from Bauxite by the Bayer process. The Bauxite residue primarily consists of iron oxides, silicon oxide, titanium oxide and undissolved alumina together with a wide range of other oxides. This depends on the place of extracted bauxite and during refinery process, it leaves behind a residue known as Red Mud. It is composed of a ...

The 3 rd most abundant element in the earth’s crust is Aluminium, just after oxygen and silicon. The production of Aluminium starts with its primary raw material – Bauxite ore which is the world’s primary source of the metal. Not surprisingly, Aluminium is the second most use metal in the world after iron & steel. From household utensils to space satellites, there are thousands of applications of the metal. The bauxite ore occurs mostly in the tropics. It is usually deposited in horizontal layers with either a little or no overburden.   These layers are usually found mixed with other clay minerals, iron oxides, and titanium dioxide. The ore itself is covered in a red jacket of mud and rock imparted to it by the oxides of iron present in the soil. For recovery, washing the ore is a must before it is passed for processing. Thus, it is first transported to crushing and washing plants before being sent for alumina extraction. The sludge is usually deposited in tailing ...