| Discovery date | 1825 |
| Discovered by | Hans Oersted |
| Origin of the name | The name is derived from the Latin name for alum, 'alumen' meaning bitter salt. |
| Allotropes |
|
Al
Aluminium
13
26.982
| Group | 13 | Melting point | 660.323°C, 1220.581°F, 933.473 K |
| Period | 3 | Boiling point | 2519°C, 4566°F, 2792 K |
| Block | p | Density (g cm−3) | 2.70 |
| Atomic number | 13 | Relative atomic mass | 26.982 |
| State at 20°C | Solid | Key isotopes | 27Al |
| Electron configuration | [Ne] 3s23p1 | CAS number | 7429-90-5 |
| ChemSpider ID | 4514248 | ChemSpider is a free chemical structure database | |
Image explanation
Aircraft fuselages and aluminium foil are just two of the many and varied uses of this element
Appearance
Aluminium is a silvery-white, lightweight metal. It is soft and malleable.
Uses
Aluminium is used in a huge variety of products including cans, foils, kitchen utensils, window frames, beer kegs and aeroplane parts. This is because of its particular properties. It has low density, is non-toxic, has a high thermal conductivity, has excellent corrosion resistance and can be easily cast, machined and formed. It is also non-magnetic and non-sparking. It is the second most malleable metal and the sixth most ductile.
It is often used as an alloy because aluminium itself is not particularly strong. Alloys with copper, manganese, magnesium and silicon are lightweight but strong. They are very important in the construction of aeroplanes and other forms of transport.
Aluminium is a good electrical conductor and is often used in electrical transmission lines. It is cheaper than copper and weight for weight is almost twice as good a conductor.
When evaporated in a vacuum, aluminium forms a highly reflective coating for both light and heat. It does not deteriorate, like a silver coating would. These aluminium coatings have many uses, including telescope mirrors, decorative paper, packages and toys.
Biological role
Aluminium has no known biological role. In its soluble +3 form it is toxic to plants. Acidic soils make up almost half of arable land on Earth, and the acidity speeds up the release of Al3+ from its minerals. Crops can then absorb the Al3+ leading to lower yields.
Our bodies absorb only a small amount of the aluminium we take in with our food. Foods with above average amounts of aluminium are tea, processed cheese, lentils and sponge cakes (where it comes from the raising agent). Cooking in aluminium pans does not greatly increase the amount in our diet, except when cooking acidic foods such as rhubarb. Some indigestion tablets are pure aluminium hydroxide.
Aluminium can accumulate in the body, and a link with Alzheimer’s disease (senile dementia) has been suggested but not proven.
Natural abundance
Aluminium is the most abundant metal in the Earth’s crust (8.1%) but is rarely found uncombined in nature. It is usually found in minerals such as bauxite and cryolite. These minerals are aluminium silicates.
Most commercially produced aluminium is extracted by the Hall–Héroult process. In this process aluminium oxide is dissolved in molten cryolite and then electrolytically reduced to pure aluminium. Making aluminium is very energy intensive. 5% of the electricity generated in the USA is used in aluminium production. However, once it has been made it does not readily corrode and can be easily recycled.
The analysis of a curious metal ornament found in the tomb of Chou-Chu, a military leader in 3rd century China, turned out to be 85% aluminium. How it was produced remains a mystery. By the end of the 1700s, aluminium oxide was known to contain a metal, but it defeated all attempts to extract it. Humphry Davy had used electric current to extract sodium and potassium from their so-called ‘earths’ (oxides), but his method did not release aluminium in the same way. The first person to produce it was Hans Christian Oersted at Copenhagen, Denmark, in 1825, and he did it by heating aluminium chloride with potassium. Even so, his sample was impure. It fell to the German chemist Friedrich Wöhler to perfect the method in 1827, and obtain pure aluminium for the first time by using sodium instead of potassium.
| Atomic radius, non-bonded (Å) | 1.84 | Covalent radius (Å) | 1.24 |
| Electron affinity (kJ mol−1) | 41.762 |
Electronegativity (Pauling scale) |
1.61 |
|
Ionisation energies (kJ mol−1) |
1st
577.539
2nd
1816.679
3rd
2744.781
4th
11577.469
5th
14841.857
6th
18379.49
7th
23326.3
8th
27465.52
|
||
| Common oxidation states | 3 | ||||
| Isotopes | Isotope | Atomic mass | Natural abundance (%) | Half life | Mode of decay |
| 27Al | 26.982 | 100 | - | - | |
|
|
|
Specific heat capacity (J kg−1 K−1) |
897 | Young's modulus (GPa) | 70.3 | |||||||||||
| Shear modulus (GPa) | 26.1 | Bulk modulus (GPa) | 75.5 | |||||||||||
| Vapour pressure | ||||||||||||||
| Temperature (K) |
|
|||||||||||||
| Pressure (Pa) |
|
|||||||||||||
| Listen to Aluminium Podcast |
|
Transcript :
Chemistry in its element: aluminium (Promo) You're listening to Chemistry in its element brought to you by Chemistry World, the magazine of the Royal Society of Chemistry. (End promo) Chris Smith This week the chemical cause of transatlantic linguistic friction. Is it an um or an ium at the end? It turns out us Brits might have egg on our faces as well as a liberal smattering of what we call aluminium. Kira J. Weissman 'I feel like I'm trapped in a tin box at 39000 feet'. It's a common refrain of the flying-phobic, but maybe they would find comfort in knowing that the box is actually made of aluminium - more than 66000 kg of it, if they're sitting in a jumbo jet. While lamenting one's presence in an 'aluminium box' doesn't have quite the same ring, there are several good reasons to appreciate this choice of material. Pure aluminium is soft. However, alloying it with elements such as such as copper, magnesium, and zinc, dramatically boosts its strength while leaving it lightweight, obviously an asset when fighting against gravity. The resulting alloys, sometimes more malleable than aluminium itself, can be moulded into a variety of shapes, including the aerodynamic arc of a plane's wings, or its tubular fuselage. And whereas iron rusts away when exposed to the elements, aluminium forms a microscopically thin oxide layer, protecting its surface from further corrosion. With this hefty CV, it's not surprising to find aluminium in many other vehicles, including ships, cars, trucks, trains and bicycles. Happily for the transportation industry, nature has blessed us with vast quantities of aluminium. The most abundant metal in the earth's crust, it's literally everywhere. Yet aluminium remained undiscovered until 1808, as it's bound up with oxygen and silicon into hundreds of different minerals, never appearing naturally in its metallic form. Sir Humphrey Davy, the Cornish chemist who discovered the metal, called it 'aluminum', after one of its source compounds, alum. Shortly after, however, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (or IUPAC) stepped in, standardizing the suffix to the more conventional 'ium'. In a further twist to the nomenclature story, the American Chemical Society resurrected the original spelling in 1925, and so ironically it is the Americans and not the British that pronounce the element's name as Davy intended. In 1825, the honour of isolating aluminium for the first time fell to the Danish Scientist Hans Christian Øersted. He reportedly said of his prize, 'It forms a lump of metal that resembles tin in colour and sheen" - not an overly flattering description, but possibly an explanation for airline passengers' present confusion. The difficulty of ripping aluminium from its oxides - for all early processes yielded only kilogram quantities at best - ensured its temporary status as a precious metal, more valuable even than gold. In fact, an aluminium bar held pride of place alongside the Crown Jewels at the 1855 Paris Exhibition, while Napoleon is said to have reserved aluminium tableware for only his most honoured guests. It wasn't until 1886 that Charles Martin Hall, an uncommonly dogged, amateur scientist of 22, developed the first economic means for extracting aluminium. Working in a woodshed with his older sister as assistant, he dissolved aluminium oxide in a bath of molten sodium hexafluoroaluminate (more commonly known as 'cryolite'), and then pried the aluminium and oxygen apart using a strong electrical current. Remarkably, another 22 year-old, the Frenchman Paul Louis Toussaint Héroult, discovered exactly the same electrolytic technique at almost exactly the same time, provoking a transatlantic patent race. Their legacy, enshrined as the Hall-Héroult process, remains the primary method for producing aluminium on a commercial scale - currently million of tons every year from aluminium's most plentiful ore, bauxite. It wasn't only the transportation industry that grasped aluminium's advantages. By the early 1900s, aluminium had already supplanted copper in electrical power lines, its flexibility, light weight and low cost more than compensating for its poorer conductivity. Aluminium alloys are a construction favourite, finding use in cladding, windows, gutters, door frames and roofing, but are just as likely to turn up inside the home: in appliances, pots and pans, utensils, TV aerials, and furniture. As a thin foil, aluminium is a packaging material par excellence, flexible and durable, impermeable to water, and resistant to chemical attack - in short, ideal for protecting a life-saving medication or your favourite candy bar. But perhaps aluminium's most recognizable incarnation is the aluminium beverage can, hundreds of billions of which are produced annually. Each can's naturally glossy surface makes as an attractive backdrop for the product name, and while its thin walls can withstand up to 90 pounds of pressure per square inch (three times that in a typical car tyre), the contents can be easily accessed with a simple pull on the tab. And although aluminium refining gobbles up a large chunk of global electricity, aluminium cans can be recycled economically and repeatedly, each time saving almost 95% of the energy required to smelt the metal in the first place. There is, however, a darker side to this shiny metal. Despite its abundance in Nature, aluminium is not known to serve any useful purpose for living cells. Yet in its soluble, +3 form, aluminium is toxic to plants. Release of Al3+ from its minerals is accelerated in the acidic soils which comprise almost half of arable land on the planet, making aluminium a major culprit in reducing crop yields. Humans don't require aluminium, and yet it enters our bodies every day - it's in the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat. While small amounts of aluminium are normally present in foods, we are responsible for the major sources of dietary aluminium: food additives, such as leavening, emulsifying and colouring agents. Swallowing over-the-counter antacids can raise intake levels by several thousand-fold. And many of us apply aluminium-containing deodorants directly to our skin every day. What's worrying about all this is that several studies have implicated aluminium as a risk factor for both breast cancer and Alzheimer's disease. While most experts remain unconvinced by the evidence, aluminium at high concentrations is a proven neurotoxin, primarily effecting bone and brain. So, until more research is done, the jury will remain out. Now, perhaps that IS something to trouble your mind on your next long haul flight. Chris Smith Researcher Kira Weissman from Saarland University in Saarbruken, Germany with the story of Aluminium and why I haven't been saying it in the way that Humphrey David intended. Next week, talking of the way the elements sound, what about this one. Brian Clegg There aren't many elements with names that are onomatopoeic. Say oxygen or iodine and there is no clue in the sound of the word to the nature of the element, but zinc is different - zinc, zinc, zinc, you can almost hear a set of coins falling into an old fashioned bath. It just has to be a hard metal. In use, zinc is often hidden away, almost secretive. It stops iron rusting, sooths sunburn, keeps dandruff at bay, combines with copper to make a very familiar gold coloured alloy and keeps us alive but we hardly notice it. Chris Smith And you can catch up with the clink of zinc with Brian Clegg on next week's Chemistry in its element. I'm Chris Smith, thank you for listening and goodbye. (Promo) Chemistry in its element is brought to you by the Royal Society of Chemistry and produced by thenakedscientists.com. There's more information and other episodes of Chemistry in its element on our website at chemistryworld.org/elements. (End promo)
|
Learn Chemistry: Your single route to hundreds of free-to-access chemistry teaching resources.
Visual Elements images and videos
© Murray Robertson 1998-2017.
W. M. Haynes, ed., CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, CRC Press/Taylor and Francis, Boca Raton, FL, 95th Edition, Internet Version 2015, accessed December 2014.
Tables of Physical & Chemical Constants, Kaye & Laby Online, 16th edition, 1995. Version 1.0 (2005), accessed December 2014.
J. S. Coursey, D. J. Schwab, J. J. Tsai, and R. A. Dragoset, Atomic Weights and Isotopic Compositions (version 4.1), 2015, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD, accessed November 2016.
T. L. Cottrell, The Strengths of Chemical Bonds, Butterworth, London, 1954.
John Emsley, Nature’s Building Blocks: An A-Z Guide to the Elements, Oxford University Press, New York, 2nd Edition, 2011.
Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility - Office of Science Education, It’s Elemental - The Periodic Table of Elements, accessed December 2014.
Periodic Table of Videos, accessed December 2014.
Derived in part from material provided by the British Geological Survey © NERC.
Elements 1-112, 114, 116 and 117 © John Emsley 2012. Elements 113, 115, 117 and 118 © Royal Society of Chemistry 2017.
Produced by The Naked Scientists.
Created by video journalist Brady Haran working with chemists at The University of Nottingham.
© Murray Robertson 1998-2017.
Data
W. M. Haynes, ed., CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, CRC Press/Taylor and Francis, Boca Raton, FL, 95th Edition, Internet Version 2015, accessed December 2014.
Tables of Physical & Chemical Constants, Kaye & Laby Online, 16th edition, 1995. Version 1.0 (2005), accessed December 2014.
J. S. Coursey, D. J. Schwab, J. J. Tsai, and R. A. Dragoset, Atomic Weights and Isotopic Compositions (version 4.1), 2015, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD, accessed November 2016.
T. L. Cottrell, The Strengths of Chemical Bonds, Butterworth, London, 1954.
Uses and properties
John Emsley, Nature’s Building Blocks: An A-Z Guide to the Elements, Oxford University Press, New York, 2nd Edition, 2011.
Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility - Office of Science Education, It’s Elemental - The Periodic Table of Elements, accessed December 2014.
Periodic Table of Videos, accessed December 2014.
Supply risk data
Derived in part from material provided by the British Geological Survey © NERC.
History text
Elements 1-112, 114, 116 and 117 © John Emsley 2012. Elements 113, 115, 117 and 118 © Royal Society of Chemistry 2017.
Podcasts
Produced by The Naked Scientists.
Periodic Table of Videos
Created by video journalist Brady Haran working with chemists at The University of Nottingham.
