The Mass-Production of Aluminum in Modern Times and its Effect on the Second Mistborn Trilogy

[Fishrage he/him]

In modern times, bauxite is much easier to refine into aluminum. Will this have any effect on the second Mistborn trilogy?

[Voidus]

Ample supply of Aluminium guns and bullets along with the general public wearing aluminium lined hats for protection from emotional allomancy

[Kaymyth she/her]

I have actually been doing a stupid amount of research on this, thanks to the story I'm writing for NaNoWriMo.

 

The modern breakthrough of refining aluminum involved two major processes.  The first was the Bayer process, which refines bauxite into aluminum oxide, aka alum or alumina.  This piece isn't all that difficult, and may already exist in AoL.

 

It's part two that's the tricky one - the one we call the Hall-Heroult process.  Before that was developed, turning aluminum oxide into pure aluminum consumed a lot of other substances that were relatively rare and expensive.  In our own history, aluminum was a precious metal, more valuable than silver or gold, until this process was developed.  There was even a crown jewel display that had a bar of aluminum in it.  The thing about aluminum is that it is so wildly chemically reactive that it forms extremely strong bonds to other elements, making it difficult to refine out.  Interestingly, this is also one of the many properties that makes it so useful - pure aluminum in metallic form will quickly form a coating of its oxide which protects it from further corrosion.  In other words, it reacts so quickly it builds its own oxide armor.

 

The key piece to Hall-Heroult is electricity, and a lot of it.  Instead of using expensive substances to convince the aluminum to decouple from the oxygen, it pours in a huge amount of energy via electrolysis.  Electricity is still in the development phase in AoL, but the technology is well within their grasp.  In fact, given that in our world two different scientists (Hall and Heroult) developed the process independently of each other virtually simultaneously, it's only a matter of time before someone on Scadrial works it out.

[Lord Tavash Shar]

As for The effects of the above post on the subject of being able to make a lot of aluminum. I have been wondering, how do aluminum projectiles Trajectories look leaving or entering  a speed or slow bubble? 

 

We know that aluminum stops Feruchemical gold healing and that both kolosis and Allomantic pewter health and durability mean nothing. Like wise it blocks a/Feruchemical tin, brass and zinc.

 

I would love to know how it interacts with time bubbles but in AoL wayne never shoots a gun and uses time bubbles to get out of the way of bullets. Meaning he is not paying attention to what happens as they pass that horizon.

[killersquirrel59 he/him]

I've actually wondered for a while how anyone could use Aluminum allomantically since it forms the oxide coating so quickly. If it is like other metals, then impurities make it unusable at best and potentially lethal at first. Yet every piece of aluminum has an inherent impurity in that oxide coating.

[Kaymyth she/her]

I've actually wondered for a while how anyone could use Aluminum allomantically since it forms the oxide coating so quickly. If it is like other metals, then impurities make it unusable at best and potentially lethal at first. Yet every piece of aluminum has an inherent impurity in that oxide coating.

 

That's an excellent point.  Maybe because it's on the outside of the metal, and not embedded within?  Or maybe stomach acid eats through the coating quickly enough that it doesn't come into play?  It's a pretty minute amount of oxide.

 

Aluminum's pretty weird stuff, all told.  On the periodic table, it's on that borderline between metals and metalloids.  There's actually some disagreement in science as to which it really is.  That might be why it's so Allomantically weird; it's just metal enough to do something, but its metalloid properties throw everything out of whack.