[TheForge] Aluminum vs. Aluminium

[Robert Oppenheimer]

The solid rocket boosters used on the space shuttle contained 1 million 
pounds of propellant each. 16% of that was powdered aluminum. That's a 
lot of recycled beer cans...

https://www.nasa.gov/returntoflight/system/system_SRB.html


On 9/25/2017 2:16 PM, Dave Smucker wrote:
> It is Blacksmiths that are fuel with beer :)  An interesting thing about aluminum is that if you have a location with excessive electrical capacity one way to ship that electrical energy is to convert it to aluminum.  You have to build the smelter, have power generation and bring in the refined alumina (AlO2) to smelt and ship out the ingots.  Being done today in the middle east from oil / gas and in Iceland, Norway and other locations from hydro.
>
>  From Beer Cans to electrical - just need a way to reverse smelt the metal.
>
> By the way the other big market for used aluminum cans is in steel production - shredded cans are added to the molten steel to deox or kill the steel.  The aluminum grapes the oxygen and turns it into AlO2 which comes to the surface and can be removed with other flux.
>
> Dave Smucker
> Brasstown, NC
>