History of aluminium _______________home compounds ores uses

Aluminium is a relatively new discovery.

The British scientist, Sir Humphrey Davy, named aluminium in 1807,but was unable to produce any. then in 1825, a small lump of aluminium was produced by Hans Christian Oersted, a Danish chemist, whose work was further developed by Friederick Wohler of Germany.Wohler's process was also improved by the French chemist Henri Sainte-Claire Deville who, with the assistance of France's Emperor Napoleon III, opened the world's first aluminium factory in 1859, at Glaciere near Paris.

Aluminium, still very costly to produce and highly prized as a metal, attracted much scientific interest and in 1886, two men - Charles Martin Hall of Ohio, USA, and Paul L T Heroult of Gentilly, France, independently, and within a month of each other - simultaneously discovered the same basic process for producing inexpensive aluminium. This commercially viable process, now known as the Hall-Heroult Process, is still used throughout the world.It has been considerably improved, however, by technological advances in production and pollution control techniques so that a modern aluminium smelter, like that at Tomago, provides a clean, efficient and safe work environment at a low unit cost.

Changes in Technology

Since the discovery of the Hall-Heroult method of producing aluminium, and developments in the generation of electric power which have made commercial processing technically viable, the major technical change in the smelting process has been in pot amperage, capacity and design.The first commercial electrolytic cells carried about 600 amperes per cell, and over the last 90 years the scale and change in cell design has increased and means that some cells in more modern smelters now carry more than 300,000 amperes.Tomago Aluminium uses 180,000 amperage technology developed by one of the world's leading aluminium companies, Pechiney of France.

The two well known kinds of technology are called "Soderberg" and "Pre-baked" technology. The major differences between the two include the outward appearance of the pot itself, as well as the way electrolysis takes place - the Soderberg pot is open and uses a different type of unbaked material to conduct electricity inside the pot, while the Pre-baked process, like that used at Tomago, is fully enclosed and uses a number of smaller, compacted and baked anodes inside the pot.

These changes have been made to incorporate technological, design and environmental advances and have not involved any change in the fundamental aluminium production process.