[TheForge] Aluminum vs. Aluminium

[Dave Smucker]

Most of that powdered aluminum was made from pure aluminum and not the alloys in cans - still a lot of metal.  The powder is made by  blowing the molten aluminum with compressed gas - I don't remember if it is CO2 or N2. It is a very dangerous process and ALCOA built a plant in Brazil near a smelter that was designed to run with no folks present during the powder production.  The powder is highly reactive with water and will strip the O2 leaving dangerous levels of hydrogen.  Al powder is also used in metallic paints and mix with iron powder to make thermite. 
That should start a new thermite thread here.

The old process to make aluminum "powder" was to take the side scrap from rolling foil and run it through a wet (oil) hammer mill process to make flake.  This is what was first used in paints and some for paints may still be made his way.

Dave Smucker
Brasstown, NC

-----Original Message-----
From: theforge-bounces at mailman.qth.net [mailto:theforge-bounces at mailman.qth.net] On Behalf Of Robert Oppenheimer
Sent: Monday, September 25, 2017 2:37 PM
To: theforge at mailman.qth.net
Subject: Re: [TheForge] Aluminum vs. Aluminium

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
>

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