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Overview of the Bayer Process for Alumina

The Bayer process is the main industrial process for refining bauxite ore to produce alumina. It involves: 1) Digesting bauxite ore with a hot sodium hydroxide solution, which dissolves the aluminium oxide and forms sodium aluminate. 2) Filtering and precipitating aluminium hydroxide from the solution. 3) Calcining the aluminium hydroxide at high temperatures to produce aluminium oxide.

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384 views2 pages

Overview of the Bayer Process for Alumina

The Bayer process is the main industrial process for refining bauxite ore to produce alumina. It involves: 1) Digesting bauxite ore with a hot sodium hydroxide solution, which dissolves the aluminium oxide and forms sodium aluminate. 2) Filtering and precipitating aluminium hydroxide from the solution. 3) Calcining the aluminium hydroxide at high temperatures to produce aluminium oxide.

Uploaded by

Triono Syakbani
Copyright
© All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd

Bayer process

The Bayer process is the principal industrial means of refining bauxite to


produce alumina (aluminium oxide). Bauxite, the most important ore of aluminium, contains only
3054% aluminium oxide, (alumina), Al
2
O
3
, the rest being a mixture of silica, various iron oxides,
and titanium dioxide.
[1]
The aluminium oxide must be purified before it can be refined to
aluminium metal.

In the Bayer process, bauxite is digested by washing with a hot solution of sodium hydroxide,
NaOH, at 175 C, under pressure. This converts the aluminium oxide in the ore to soluble sodium
aluminate, 2NaAlO
2
, according to the chemical equation:
Al
2
O
3
+ 2 NaOH + 3 H
2
O 2 NaAlO
2

This treatment also dissolves silica, but the other components of bauxite do not dissolve.
Sometimes lime is added here, to precipitate the silica as calcium silicate. The solution is clarified
by filtering off the solid impurities, commonly with a rotary sand trap, and a flocculent such
as starch, to get rid of the fine particles. The mixture of solid impurities is called red mud.
Originally, the alkaline solution was cooled and treated by bubbling carbon dioxide into it, through
which aluminium hydroxide precipitates:
2 NaAlO
2
+ CO
2
2 Al(OH)
3
+ Na
2
CO
3
+ H
2
O
But later, this gave way to seeding the supersaturated solution with high-purity aluminum
hydroxide (Al(OH)3) crystal, which eliminated the need for cooling the liquid and was more
economically feasible:
NaAlO2 Al(OH)3 + NaOH
Then, when heated to 980C (calcined), the aluminium hydroxide decomposes to aluminium
oxide, giving off water vapor in the process:
2 Al(OH)3 Al2O3 + 3 H2O
The left-over NaOH solution is then recycled. This, however,
allows gallium and vanadium impurities to build up in the liquors, so these are extracted.
For bauxites having more than 10% silica, Bayer process becomes infeasible due to
insoluble sodium aluminum silicate being formed, which reduces yield, and another process must
be chosen.
A large amount of the aluminium oxide so produced is then subsequently smelted in the Hall
Hroult process in order to produce aluminium.

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