What makes aluminium a metal

Improve this question. Zar Ni Zar Ni 2 2 gold badges 2 2 silver badges 3 3 bronze badges. And a highly conductive one at that. No doubt about it. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. The reason why, in a few cases, aluminium is referred to as a metalloid, from the article: It has some properties that are unusual for a metal; taken together, these are sometimes used as a basis to classify aluminium as a metalloid.

Aluminium can form anionic aluminates, such behaviour being considered nonmetallic in character The line between metals and non-metals is somewhat arbitrary with Elements to the lower left of the line generally display increasing metallic behaviour; elements to the upper right display increasing nonmetallic behaviour. Improve this answer. Community Bot 1. Featured on Meta. Now live: A fully responsive profile. Version labels for answers. Linked Related 7. Hot Network Questions. Question feed.

Chemistry Stack Exchange works best with JavaScript enabled. In the meantime one of the less precious corundum minerals, emery, is used as an abrasive, for example in sand cloth. Today we know about almost various aluminium compounds and minerals containing aluminium, from feldspar, a key source mineral on Earth, to ruby, sapphire and emerald, which are far less common.

Humphry Davy. The British physicist and chemist Sir Humphry Davy was the first to obtain a new chemical element using electrolysis: he was able to obtain boron from boric acid. He went on to use electrolysis to isolate six more previously unknown metals: potassium, sodium, barium, calcium, magnesium and strontium. It was Davy who proved the existence of aluminium, the metal found in alumina, and gave it its name. But regardless of how common aluminium may be, it may have remained hidden forever if it hadn't been for electricity.

The discovery of aluminium was made possible when scientists were able to use electricity to break down chemical compounds into their elements. In the 19 century the Danish physicist Christian Oersted used electrolysis to obtain aluminium. Electrolysis or electrolytic reduction is the process that is used to produce aluminium today as well. Another rather common mineral, bauxite, is used today as the primary raw material in aluminium production. Bauxite is a clay mineral comprising various modifications of aluminium hydroxide mixed with iron, silicon, titanium, sulphur, gallium, chromium, vanadium oxides, as well as sulphuric calcium, iron and magnesium carbonates.

In other words, your typical bauxite contains almost half the periodic table. By the way, because of the texture of bauxite about a hundred years ago aluminium was often referred to rather poetically as silver obtained from clay.

On the average tonnes of bauxite are needed to produce 1 tonne of aluminium. Bauxites were discovered in by geologist Pierre Berthier in Southern France. The new minerals were named after the area they were discovered in: Les Baux. In the first stage of aluminium production bauxite is processed into alumina, or aluminium oxide Al 2 O 3.

Alumina looks like white powder and it is then processed into aluminium at aluminium smelters using electrolytic reduction. Aluminium production requires huge amounts of electricity, about 15 MWH per tonne of output. That's approximately as much as a apartment block consumes in a month. Aluminum production may not seem that difficult on the surface, but that is far from the truth. That is why the recycling process has become so important.

Extracting and producing aluminum that is used in our society is a difficult, time-consuming and energy-intensive process. Hypothetically, say you extracted yourself some real nice raw aluminum and found yourself left with a shiny billet. What do you do now? Melt that sucker down and alloy it, that's what! Pure aluminum is extremely soft, and often not strong enough for most commercial uses and projects. In order to fix this, pure aluminum is melted down and mixed with other elements such as iron, silicon, copper, magnesium, manganese, and zinc.

By alloying with these other elements, aluminum's properties such as strength, density, workability, electrical conductivity, and corrosion resistance are enhanced. During the aluminum alloying process, three different types of alloys can be produced depending on their attributes and what methods are used to treat them: commercially pure, heat-treatable, and non heat-treatable. Each type of aluminum alloy can then be further sub-divided and characterized by its main alloying element.

This is down by assigning each type of alloy a four-digit number to help classify it, where the first digit identifies a general class or series. Heat Treatable: alloys that are strengthened through an extreme heating and cooling process. Alloys are heated to specific points to evenly distribute the elements within and then quenched rapidly cooled to freeze them in place. Non-Heat Treatable: alloys that are strengthened through a process known as cold-working.

This process occurs by "working" the metal during its rolling or forging stages and building up dislocations in the metal's atomic structure to increase the strength.