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How are alloys a worse source of pure aluminium than natural deposits? Are natural deposits available where the aluminium is very pure once you squint hard enou
by usrusr 2y ago
How are alloys a worse source of pure aluminium than natural deposits? Are natural deposits available where the aluminium is very pure once you squint hard enough to not see anything else in the mix that has sufficiently different properties to be easily shareable?
- kkfx 2y agoIt's a matter of easiness of separations: in natural deposits you have to process much material to get a little quantity of mineral, but getting a pure enough mineral is still easy. Separating alloys it's often much harder because alloy component tend to change phase together (so you can make them liquid, but you still have no way to separate when they are liquid) chemical bonds keeps them together. For some it's easy, let's say you add a substance that separate them, or heat separate them because they change from solid to liquid at different temperatures and so on, for many others it's complicated enough you recover little quantity of the original material spending too much in the process.
- usrusr 2y agoThanks. So an ore with a high aluminium content that also has some amount of e.g. iron (I read that as an example in another comment?) would be worse than an ore with much less aluminium, but where everything else is "more different". Or where it actually does contain a multitude of metals that would be inconvenient in an alloy, but that happen to be bound to different "carriers" that are easy to separate before splitting the molecules. Interesting. Really makes one admire the geological processes that gave us those convenient ores.