文档介绍：Aluminum smelting
1. HISTORY
A. Chemical displacement
Hans Christian Oersted first heated potassium amalgam with aluminum chloride and produced tiny pieces
of aluminum in 1825. This was twenty years after Sir Humphrey Davy first named the metal “aluminum.”
Davy was the first to use electrolysis to produce samples of potassium, sodium, strontium, calcium,
barium, magnesium and boron. He tried essfully for many years to produce aluminum by
electrolysis. Even though he could not isolate it he was convinced that it existed and named it anyway.
(Later, in much of the world, the name was changed to "aluminium" to be consistent with other metals. In
North America the original spelling is still used.)
Twenty years later Wohler passed aluminum chloride vapor over molten potassium and managed to
produce larger globules of aluminum. Each globule weighed only between 10 and 15 milligrams.
It was not until 1854 that a French schoolteacher, Henri Sainte-Claire Deville, substituted cheaper sodium
as the reductant. He managed to prepare a small bar of aluminum. It was so precious that it was
displayed next to the Crown Jewels at the Paris Exposition the next year.
The French Emperor, Napoleon III, financed Deville's work on aluminum. He hoped that aluminum could
be used to make lightweight armor. Napoleon used aluminum cutlery on special occa