November 2025 Volume 7

MATERIALS

ALUMINUM FORGINGS – COMMERCIAL AND TECHNICAL LANDSCAPE By Mike Manning and Blake Nelson

A luminum is a metal that is used commonly in various industries today with a long history leading up to its ubiquity today. Aluminum was first isolated as a metal in 1825 by Hans Christian Oersted, but industrial production was not possible until the development of the Hall-Héroult process in 1886, which is still used today to refine

The nation with the most alumina production today is China with Australia, Brazil, and India, second, third, and fourth respectively. China is also the largest smelter of aluminum with India the second largest smelter of aluminum. The final step in aluminum production. The Hall-Héroult process involves dissolving the alumina powder in molten salt and aluminum fluoride, then an electric current is run through the solution which breaks down the alumina into aluminum metal and oxygen 4 . The aluminum metal produced is in molten form and can be siphoned off and more alumina can be added to the reaction chamber making the aluminum refinement process continuous 4 . Figure 2 below is a visual representation of the process to produce aluminum metal starting with the mined Bauxite to the end use application and eventually the recycling industry. All said, it takes about 6 tons of bauxite to make 2 tons of alumina to yield 1 ton of aluminum metal.

alumina into aluminum 1 . The properties of aluminum made it of particular interest in various industries and products including aerospace, food packaging, beverage cans, cookware, and more recently semiconductor industry 1 .

Figure 1: Aluminum Ore (Bauxite) Aluminum typically goes from ore to metal in three stages. The production of aluminum starts with mining bauxite (see Figure 1) which is a material comprised of aluminum hydroxide minerals with a mixture of silica, iron oxides, and other impurities 2 . Bauxite is a relatively common material, however, there are limited reserves of bauxite in the United States and therefore the bauxite processed in the U.S. was mined abroad notably in Jamaica 3 . Bauxite is typically extracted from the ground in open-pit mines, with just three countries—Australia, China, and Guinea—accounting for ~70% of global mine production. Each year, the world produces almost 400 million tons of bauxite rock, and ~85% of it is used to make aluminum 12 . The second step is converting bauxite to aluminum. In the 1890s, Austrian chemist Carl Josef Bayer invented a revolutionary process for extracting alumina from bauxite. The basic process of going from ore to alumina includes digestion, filtration, precipitation and calcination. At a high level, the conversion to alumina is by a chemical reaction involving bathing bauxite powder in sodium hydroxide and precipitating out alumina crystals. Finished by heating to ~2000 F to remove water from the alumina to prepare it for the Hall-Héroult process 4 . To this day, almost 90% of alumina refineries still use the Bayer process to refine bauxite. The impurities or “red mud” left behind in the alumina production process is a major environmental concern. In fact, refineries produce 120% of the usable alumina weight in “red mud”.

Figure 2: Outline of Production Process for Aluminum In 2024 the largest producer of aluminum was China making an estimated 43 million tons of aluminum accounting for ~59% of global aluminum production, followed by India as second largest but only 10% of the China output. Only ~4 million tons of aluminum were produced in North America during the same time accounting for 5.5 percent of global production 5 . Most of the North America production being in Canada. The economic impact on North American, and specifically the U.S., having to import most of the aluminum required to feed the aluminum forming and processing industries is significant. At the time of publication, both the metal price and premium to deliver to U.S. (Midwest) are at 12-month highs (See Table 1).

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