Greetings from Arkansas. In addition to the aluminum industry here, Arkansas was also where the toothbrush was invented. We don't really have any documentation to prove this, but if the toothbrush was invented anywhere else they would have called it a teethbursh.
Resident Material science guy again. Lab coat and "uhm actually" at the ready. Errata at 16:50 A eutectoid reaction is a completely different thing than a eutectic reaction. The eutectic point is just that. Along with that, there is a eutectic temperature and eutectic composition. The eutectic reaction is Liquid -> Solid 1 + Solid 2 on cooling. The eutectoid reaction is Solid 1 -> Solid 2 + Solid 3 on cooling. For example, there is a eutectoid in the Fe-C system (Steel) where upon cooling the austenite, the material separates into ferrite and iron carbide. -ic = liquid to something -oid = solid to something This holds true for the other invariant reactions too: monotectic, syntectic, peritectic, peritectoid, etc.
We just went through the industrial revolution, a geology class, and advanced chemistry. All by way of a miter saw and 22 minutes. I wonder if Uncle Bumble has trouble sleeping at night? For some reason, I feel his brain never shuts down.
I'm not sure of your profession, but if I had you as a college professor or highschool teacher I wouldn't be a truck driver. Brilliant, entertaining and engaging.
@@NGC1433 nothing to be honest. Just not very glamorous. I was a Citrix/VM admin 5 years ago. I grossed 210k US so far this year driving this old truck. Let's not talk about expenses though. Congrats on making the switch. 20 years in IT. I only miss my vacation time.
The alumina being processed in Iceland comes (in part, at least) from Australia, of all places. Still cheaper to ship that shit halfway around the earth than to do it locally. And the three aluminum smelters consume close to 75% of all electricity generated here. Crazy world we live in.
I could really use some 8-hour versions of these talks to get me through the work day. Nothing like touching on everything from social anthropology to metallurgy to the industrial revolution to get through the morning grind.
Uncle Bumblefuck has gone full James Burke (the old Connectiond PBS series) on this one. And that is about the highest compliment I can give because that series was awesome.
True story, The Danish chemist who first managed to extract aluminium from ore gifted a dinner set to the Danish King, allowing the Danish King to throw the ultimate bling state dinners. Of course there weren't enough aluminium plates for every one so the less important dignitaries had to eat of gold plates.
@@TheTurinturumbar Yeah it is true, the danish king was just the first to do it. Aluminium remained a very expensive material until the modern electrical process of extracting it from aluminium sand was invented.
@@0num4Confoundem? I barely knew her! Though, tulips on my stem is better than four bushes full of birds if'n ya ain't got no stones? I think Willy S. said that.
My great grandfather worked for Reynolds Aluminum in Bauxite Arkansas when he wasn't serving in WW2. He would say it took two days to shutdown the production line and two days to get going again, so they just kept going almost year round. I believe he said they would shutdown around Christmas and resume January 1, he was high up the maintenance side and would do most of the overhauls and repairs then. Last time I was down that way the old steel skeleton of the plant was still standing, they stripped the walls and roof a long time ago.
Sigh... Don't be an arrogant fool due to your blatant ignorance. Oil/NG only requires heat/pressure+HC's and is made in as little as hours to as long as forever(Kerogen) depending on conditions. ALL ROCK has HC's in it. From the hardest Granite to the softest sandstone. The deepest wells through hard rock have HC's along with water at all depths. Types of rock hold HC's better than others. Sandstone, can be poor or wonderful for holding HC's. If heated sufficiently said HC's become MOBILE and if held in place under pressure(increase heat) long enough depending on the porosity of the rock will migrate out of the rock or become fixed in place as oil/ng. Why oil/ng is found under domes of HARD rock that does not allow, well slows, the migration of the HC's through it with loads of sandstone under, or just deep enough sandstone. KEROGEN on the other hand are HC's that have been insufficiently heated/pressure and cannot migrate. There are generally two and sometimes classed as 3 different types of Kerogen... Anyways... enjoy, but don't let your arrogance make you stupid eh?
Well, it didn't. The earth is much older than that. Well, unless you believe 24hrs hours in a day in Genesis. But, that's not accurate. It's an indeterminate amount of time, kinda like an epoch. Soooo, we really don't know how long/old
@@marvintpandroid2213 Hahah I didn't take it offensively, and I'm not sick :) it's all good. Then again, it could of all happened in a much shorter span of time if we all live in a simulation
We used to have a bunch of aluminum plants here in the PNW. Tons of electricity coming from the dams on the Columbia River. Then ENRON managed to ruin it and shut them all down and they never re-opened. And then Ken Lay had the nerve to just die in prison before serving his full sentence. Makes my blood boil every time I think about it.
You realize if he gave lectures and showed his face no one would watch. I think he is really sand bagging on his level of genius. Learned a metric tonne!
I don't think he's sandbagging at all, he just doesn't feel the need to intellectually masturbate - I think that's what's so captivating and relateable. The first BOLTR I ever watched it was apparent that he knew more about electronics, plastics, manufacturing, metallurgy, machining, etc. etc. than just about anyone other than an expert in those specific fields. To know all of them simultaneously is god-tier. He's like that uncle (bumblefuck) that you love that seems to know everything, but turned up to 11.
@Sheldon Robertson tell that to the rivers in north England where the chems have been found and they have shut down franking due to earth quake. The water is being cleaned currently as its considered a health hazard.
Ah yes, good old Florine, the friendliest of the elements in the 'old feller what took an unhealthy shine to your 12 year old son' way. They tried using Florine as a rocket fuel oxidizer, and they achieved some mind bogglingly good efficiency numbers with a combination of cryogenic Hydrogen, cryogenic Florine and molten Lithium, but in the end they came to the conclusion that working with a substance that would happily oxidize anything or anyone it came into contact with was probably not a good idea.
Yep. Accidentally knock over a barrel of that shit and it'll set fire to the asphalt, the gravel underneath the asphalt and five feet of dirt and rock below that.
It wouldn't surprise me if AvE had a doctorate, but neither would it surprise me if he didn't... a lot of these cross-disciplinary genius types can't handle the narrow focus of schooling.
There's not that many people pumping sintered bauxite for prop. Most of the shales in North America don't have the closure pressure to really justify it on a cost basis. Instead people are running regular silica sand. Average wells out in West Texas (for example) take about 15,000,000 lbs of proppant and bauxite is about 20x more expensive than sand.
@@SexDrugsFinance very high crush strength but there are ways to get sand to act like very high crush bauxite. You can pump more sand (increased proppant loading is correlated with decreased stress loading on individual grains) or you can pump resin coated sand (it deforms instead of shattering) it's more expensive than plain sand but still far cheaper than bauxite
@@the_real_ch3 Interesting. I take it resin costed sand is has some environmental concerns? Any idea how common these methods are? I get the impression most fracking operations right now are at low pressure sites.
SexDrugsFinance West Texas commonly sees closure stresses of over 6500psi and the brown sand they are pumping has crush strengths of 6k-ish. And seems to be doing good enough. There has been work done that shows that even a crushed proppant pack still retains enough permeability to allow for the well to be productive.
The stuff used as a mordant for dying textiles is actually alum, which is aluminium potassium sulphate; and not alumina (aluminium oxide). The way the mordants work is that the metal salt dissolves in water, and then when the fibre is soaked in the solution. This allows the soluble metal ions to enter the fibres. Then it's drained, and placed in the dye bath, which contains the coloured substances. These then soak into the fibres too, but the coloured stuff reacted with the metal ions (forming what chemists call a complex), and this complex is _insoluble_. That's how they get the colour to stick, and it doesn't wash out - it actually is converted to an insoluble form inside the fibre. If the same reaction is used to make an insoluble pigment, that's known as a lake pigment. This sort of process only applies to the class of dyes called, imaginatively enough. 'mordant dyes'. Most of the important natural dyes are of this type (indigo is the blatant exception, being a vat dye). Different metals salts can be used - notably iron is said to 'sadden' colours, and tin 'brightens' them, amoung others. Tin salts were particularly important to get a good clear scarlet colour from madder root - all the armies that used 'redcoats', that was tin mordanted madder root to get that colour. Aluminium potassium sulphate is just the simplest and safest soluble aluminium salt. It can be mined directly in some places, but by the time Bayer was working on aluminium, it was made from alumina due to the scale of demand. Oddly enough, right around then saw a decline in the use of mordant dyes, as that was roughly when acid dyes started to take over the commercial market; being either cheaper or better than the mordant dye equivalents.
You've convinced me not to throw my aluminum cans in the camp fire for entertainment. Better to just throw it in the garbage. Educational and entertaining as always! Thank you.
@@YodaWhat It was also strongly correlated with Alzheimers' if I'm not mistaken. Or maybe that was some weak study that got blown out of paranoiac proportions in the 90s and I'm naïvely remembering it from my teen years.
@@inthefade I would say the latter. Aluminum was suspected, but apparently no causal link was demonstrated. Also because Aluminum compounds are still widely used in foodstuffs (baking powder, "lake" type dyes, some types of pickles and some medicines), even though there are alternatives to using Aluminum compounds. Maalox antacid is named for Magnesium and Aluminum Oxides. Magnesium alone would cause diarrhea, so they added some Aluminum, which has the opposite effect. Eat too much cake made with Aluminum compounds in the baking powder and you may plug up solid.
@@YodaWhat For the sake of pedantry: the zirconium compound is aluminum as well. (Aluminum Zirconium Trichlorohydrex Gly 19% (Anhydrous)) for Old Spice. I'm sorry I offended the chemistry nerds by not adding the hydrochloric acid to my alumina.
WOW now that I got all ensmartened I am gonna shut down the moomshine still and start makin that luminum stuff. Hey when do I get my diploma in the mail anyhow?
I caught this as well. It's not the core, it's the crust he should have mentioned. The Earth's core is primarily iron with nickel and some other heavy metals.
"Where was I going...?" I love it! I've been found with a dozen of the encyclopedia sections open and spread around the floor. Probably more times than I should admit if I care to further reproduce...
In spanish theres "Mordiente" which is that, some chemical which helps the dye to stick to the cloth. Also "morder" (mo as in mordor and der as in derivative ) is "to bite"
Working in a small engine factory, we deal all day with die-cast aluminum. And it's frustrating at times, because like with all casting, Quality Control is PARAMOUNT. Shrinkage Porosity is the biggest thing to worry about. As the aluminum cools it contracts, and sometimes it rips voids into itself while doing this. So you machine down an engine head a lo and behold, a chunk of metal is missing from the surface where the headgasket goes, and the whole head is unusable. Gas Porosity is a also possible, little air bubbles. While this is pretty common, it's amazing that it isn't constant, because like AvE said, die-casting is like an art. And if anything is fucked up about the process, the castings will be fucked up. I've had to send thousands of machined castings back to be torn apart and recycled, because of shrinkage porosity from bad method and bad QC.
Local points!!! I live right next to the town "Bauxite" in Arkansas. I went to school in Bauxite, for a bit... I work in a plant that uses local and sourced bauxite to create proppant, a product used in fracking.
Used to cliff jump into an old bauxite mine that had been flooded in arkansas back 25 years ago. Hadn't thought about that in a few decades. Thank you for that.
Close to power supply.....except in Victoria, Australia where some political chicanery git the smelter built about 400 kilometers away from the power stations and several thousand km away from the bauxite deposits.
I'm glad you included this. I thought it was just a gag in your previous video... glad I laughed at the gag but find out you actually did ramble on for 22 minutes. I watched and it was one of the most interesting videos I've seen from you. Fuckin oats mate
As a chemist: excellent explanation. I would just clarify that after the dissolution of bauxite they filter it to remove oxides of iron (the brown impurities seen on the photo of the rock at 3:20) and then they gently acidify the filtrate with the CO2 obtained from the Hall-Herault electrolysis process. This leads to precipitation of hydrated alumina which is then dried.
Uncle Bumblefuck! How I wish I had discovered you 45 years ago. My life would have taken a different course. Instead I had teachers who knew little and had no idea how to even get that across. Love to Chickadee
It is technically pronounced aluminum, and to be fair, that is according to the man who discovered the stuff, therefore his will be done regardless of European over proper dickishness in language
That 10 to the 6th is just around the corner. No one more deserving. If that's your kinda thing. I am going to hazard a guess and say you will ave 1MB by the time your little girl opens Santa's presents. Well done and thanks (no pun intended) a million for all the hard work, learning, new vocabulary and entertainment. Really appreciated.
SOOO much interesting info, was great to listen! You are one of those great guys who not only know bunch on everything but can speak about it without sounding annoying!!! I place you in the same bucket as Mythbuster, you are able to degonkify science and bring it down to earth. Salut to you! I need to tip in your patreon!
While I don't have as much knowledge as he does I keep learning. I have my own machine shop and program cnc, design and program plc's, hydraulics, pnuematics, welding, equipment repair and still learning. I bought a Haas mill like his with little past programming experience. I even have traveled may places to repair and install mining sample prep equipment, I'm a tech for Rocklabs. Keep learning and don't be afraid of something new.
Im an electrical engineer, and I never stop learning, but the sheer amount of knowledge he has is incredible, I want to have such great insight as he does, he has great knowledge of history, metallurgy, material sciences, hell if I could just get a list of books to learn about the different composite materials he knows about I would be ecstatic. Materials are fascinating to me but none of the mechanical engineers I work with know much about real production, and they just tell me "you'll have to take a whole class I can't recommend any books", which to be honest seems silly, I could recommend them an entire library of books on electrical engineering, any sub discipline they could ever want, most of them I even own!
My dad is a tool and die maker he has made due for car parts and several different tool parts like that sexy frigger right there its a long and killer process but he is a master he has been doing it for 25 years and he hates how his shop runs his dies because they call then right out faster then frig
Also a big salt mine in Hutchison Kansas that is storage for sensitive things the first Ben hur movie is there and most likely the original constitution, bill of rights, other stuff we want to keep safe, keep from degrading
I deal with aluminum a lot in my profession I'm a bicycle mechanic and my Kona is made out of aluminum I've been riding aluminum frame mountain bikes for a while now the full suspensions are great aluminum is so strong and tough and rigid that it makes great bike frames I've ridden my Kona 5400 miles in 3 years hey pretty much replace everything that rotates that's the way it is Aluminum is a great material especially for bikes and if it wasn't for aluminum we wouldn't have the aircraft that we have today there's so many applications that you can use aluminum for an aluminum alloys my bike has aluminum nickel zinc alloy when you make an alloy out of aluminum its strength goes up tremendously and its weight goes down metallurgy is amazing I've always been very serious and highly interested in metallurgy
If you need another example for a rant, the compositions of solders are quite interesting, especially when you're mandated for one reason or another to not use lead. Copper, Nickle, and Silver all have melting points far in excess of what would be useful for soldering, but just the right mix flows at right about 400C
I worked with AL2O3 alumina powder, nasty stuf. Gets everywhere, breathing mask was needed. Made porous alumina tubes from it, sintered them up to 1750C. Freakin' hot during the summer in the workshop.
Thank you AvE ,,Can you dissect the Devils Cabbage now that you folks in Canada can touch the Devils Cabbage?,,,,Great video,Hope the snow hasnt started for you guys ...73s
Aluminum smelting in Greenland? I had to look that one up! I know Iceland does smelting because of available hydro and geothermal power but I've always pictured Greenland as a very lightly populated wasteland. The data I see on the Greenland proposal is 10 years old and totally Hydro powered. I'm not sure of the current state.
The biggest use of electric power in New Zealand is aluminum refining. High-purity alumina from Australia is shipped to a port on the South Island, where hydroelectric power is brought in. Resulting aluminum mostly goes to Japan.
For us non Frenchifying types, here's what the Gargler says: mordent: -third-person plural present indicative of mordre -third-person plural present subjunctive of mordre It's also a term in musical annotation, similar to a trill.
Watching this to study phase diagrams for a materials science exam later today. AvE has a much better knowledge/cost ratio than any university professor.
My high school chem teacher very first day says "If you don't want to be here, you can leave now". FUUUUUUUUUCK, why did I slam my books closed, get up and fuck off. I went got a job at a fucking gas (fuel, gasoline is not a gas, hey I learned something) station. Stay in school kids I think this is what AvE does on a slow day.... HOLY SHIT! AvE.... can you go over that again, I'm lost
I learned absolutely NOTHING about Makita Chopsaws. On the flipside though I'm now neck deep in research on Tellurides and about a hundred other things I need to edumucate myself on. SPEAKING of which... I read that the city of Telluride CO was originally named Columbia and was renamed by the spanish people there to Telluride around 1878. So... why did they pick THAT name? Was it because they had done gold mining there? Did they even know what a telluride was in 1878? Beyond that... I'm a pretty big investor (2nd largest holding) in a company that's planning to build one of the largest LNG liquifaction facilities in history in Louisiana by the name of Tellurian (ticker TELL). I've long wondered what the name of the company represented. Now originally I had a theory that it had something to do with the town in Colorado, but now I'm wondering if there's some tie-in to the 'anion' meaning. Way more questions than answers. My head hurts... and I still have to figure out what Allele's are.. and my pits stink and my feet itch. Oh... and your WD40 can t-shirt picked up MAJOR value on Wall Street today with WDFC closing up by around $13.80 on an earnings beat. Rock it AvE!!! (Is your name derived from the greek ἄνω?) Hmm... where were you on the night of the 32nd?
we have a smelter in new zealand they get power at 5 cents a kw we pay 23 cents when the govt was going to raise the smelters price from 2 cents to 11 cents still less than half of what the domestic consumers pay alcan said that they would not pay it and would pack up and piss off so they settled on 5 cents, i hope they do go, because all that surplus power coming back on the grid should give us cheaper power from 100% renewable sources, at the moment we are in the 90% mark and if we all go electric cars the price of power will skyrocket because the greenies dont want any more hydro power stations, they want solar panels on the roofs, ok in summer but not in winter, but its in summer when the lakes full up because of the melting snow and we have plenty of water but winter is the big power consumer so sometimes they have to fire up gas/coal/or oil stations
When sea water freezes it becomes mostly fresh, as only the water part freezes. You can take seas ice and melt it down for drinking water. It doesn't become part of the ice.
That diagram plus Your explaination can be applied to eutectic soldering alloy (instead 60/40 Sn/Pb we have 63/37), which melts and freezex exactly at 183 deegres science, without getting soft before melting.
I Saw what you did there, putting in the makita :-D Mixing up Iceland and Greenland is an honest mistake, i blame Denmark! -The Green-one is mostly Froze cock stiff, and the Ice-one is hot? Don't make much sense. Love the show!
This is interesting: " (Na3AlF6, sodium hexafluoroaluminate) is an uncommon mineral identified with the once-large deposit at Ivittuut on the west coast of Greenland, depleted by 1987. Due to its rarity it is possibly the only mineral on Earth ever to be mined to commercial extinction."
Awesome talk AvE ... I sent 10-yrs with a big mob south of you getting splashed with caustic (NaOH - sodium hydroxide) designing/fixing/improving gear to turn bauxite to alumina. Great memories and great engineering.
It's called the HALL PROCESS! I worked in an ALCOA smelter in Vancouver Washington for 12 years in the 70s and 80s. We had to do a Fluoride survey of our urine every 6 months.
Oh to go back in time. Had I have had you during high school or college, I wouldn’t have chased so many squirrels when I got bored. BRILLIANT!!! I love that word “Chineseium”
Okay, going to ask the obvious question, mostly because I trust you more than the fuckwits in the media etc. Is fracking toxic/dangerous in your opinion. For instance in Lancashire here in the UK they had about 7 minor quakes/ground shakes just after a fracking company started up....... I'm just curious to know
