The raw materials needed to produce aluminium are Bauxite, Sodium hydroxide, electricity or electrode, silica, alumina, iron, coke, pitch and titanium oxides. The company that mines this raw material is Tomago Aluminium.
The raw materials are mined in Australia’s east coast around 13km north-west of Newcastle in the industrial suburb of Tomago.
The raw materials are mined and transported to the appropriate processing plants using prime movers and B Doubles which are trucks. The double b and the prime movers collect the raw materials from mining to the industry where they sought the raw materials up. Some of the raw materials are transported to many different places like South East Asia, Japan and China where they are processed by a variety of manufacturers. This company also process or mine the raw materials e.g. coke, alumina, pitch, bauxite.
The raw materials are processed into basic aluminum ingots by using five different steps.
1) The first step used includes melting an aluminum base metal into a molten aluminum alloy.
2) The second step is the holding step; the holding step includes holding the resulting molten aluminium alloy.
3) The fourth step is a dehydrogenation step which include of removing hydrogen gas from the molten aluminium alloy.
4) The fifth step is a filtration step of removing inclusions from the molten aluminium alloy.
5) The last step is a casting step when they solidifying the molten aluminium alloy into a basic shape
The basic