Why is it that aluminum is more costly than iron?

Answer 1

Aluminium is so expensive as it needs a lot of power and electricity to produce. With the demand of the product a whole power station is needed. This cost a lot of money and they have to charge the buyer more to pay for the production process.

Answer 2

Aluminum or Duralumin doesn't really cost very much at all.

Titanium is expensive because, while it's very common in the earth's crust, it's hard to refine except in its concentrated ore form, and concentrated titanium is quite rare. Leading producers include Australia, Canada, China, India, Norway, South Africa, and Ukraine.

Both are used in the aerospace and transportation industries due to their lightness and strength, and hence tend to drive the prices of these metals up.

Answer 3

because of how it is extracted iron can be extracted from its ore with a carbon reduction reaction but aluminum must be extracted with electrolysis which uses a lot of electricity which is expensive to produce

Answer 4

Aluminum is much more difficult to produce straight out of the earth. It naturally occurs in common earth minerals such as bauxite. A little Bayer processing turns it into aluminum oxide (Al2O3, aka alumina). This is itself a widely-used substance.

The problem becomes separating the metallic aluminum from this point. The only known way to separate metallic aluminum from aluminum oxide in quantity is through the application of lots of electricity. It's a rather complicated, laborious, and energy-costly way to extract a metal compared to the well-known and straightforward smelting techniques that can be used to extract iron.

This is one reason aluminum recycling is encouraged so much. It takes 20 times as much energy to extract aluminum from bauxite than melt and recycle already-extracted aluminum.

Answer 5

Because it takes a lot of electricity and power to extract it from its ore. A whole power station is needed because of the extremely high demand for aluminum in today's society. Because a whole station is needed, it evidently costs a lot of money and the miners also have to charge the buyer more to pay for the production process.

Hoped this helped ):

Answer 6

Aluminum is produced by electrolysis, and iron is produced by thermal dynamic heating.

Essentially, aluminum comes from a rock, which is placed in an acid bath, and heated up to around 1100 degrees. They then expose the dissolving rock to a strong electrical current. The current travels through the aluminum very efficiently, but the resistance provided by the denser rock forces the rock to dissolve even more rapidly. This process is only as expensive as the acid bath and heating coils, but because the rock that aluminum comes in, is comparatively poor in it, it costs a little more to get a lot less of it, per what you can do with iron.

Iron is simpler to produce, because it is a byproduct from getting something extremely hot. One reaction, the thermite reaction, requires powderized aluminum and a major heat source; which because it requires aluminum makes the thermite reaction more expensive than the other. The other reaction, which takes carbon monoxide -the invisible gas which is in cigarette smoke and car engines- heats up iron in an atmosphere filled with it in what is called a blast furnace.

By slowly increasing the oxygen in the room, the rock which contains iron is simply burnt away or vaporized by the massive heat around it, and the carbon monoxide is converted to carbon dioxide on the surface of the iron. The iron forms a molten puddle, and intermingled with the carbon monoxide, becomes carbonized iron, aka steel.

The technology to make iron has had a longer refinement period than aluminum. The "recipe" to make molten iron for the West is from the early Middle Ages, but the aluminum electrolysis development is MUCH younger, so it has not been cheapened through simple experience like iron refining has.

Answer 7

aluminum is cheap but not expensive you can get it for $3.00

Answer 8

Aluminium is expensive to extract because it is very reactive and is very difficult to purify. The difficulty in its purification is what makes aluminum very expensive to extract.

Answer 9

The process requires high temperatures and a lot of electricity.

Answer 10

Because aluminium is always found naturally as a compound or mineral, so you need to extract it from that compound state, these processes are very expensive and so aluminium to buy is expensive