What Is Alumina Used For In Ceramics

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What is alumina used for in ceramics.

Alumina s combination of hardness high temperature operation and good electrical insulation makes it useful for a wide range of applications. Alumina is the most well known and most commonly used fine ceramic material. In fact alumina ceramics are as hard as sapphire making them excellent choices for severe wear applications such as mill and chute linings bearings and wear plates in addition to those applications already mentioned. Known as alpha alumina in materials science communities or alundum in fused form or aloxite in the mining and ceramic communities aluminium oxide finds wide use.

It also serves as the raw material for a broad range of advanced ceramic products and as an active agent in chemical processing. Alumina also called aluminum oxide synthetically produced aluminum oxide al 2 o 3 a white or nearly colourless crystalline substance that is used as a starting material for the smelting of aluminum metal. Typical applications inlcude electrical insulators. It is ideal for wear resistant inserts or products.

The method avoids many of the problems encountered in conventional glass forming and may be extensible to other oxides. Electrical insulator alumina is commonly used as a high temperature electrical insulator particularly the higher purity grades which offer better resistivity. Abrasion resistant alumina is a very hard ceramic and is excellent at resisting abrasion. In 2004 anatoly rosenflanz and colleagues at 3m used a flame spray technique to alloy aluminium oxide or alumina with rare earth metal oxides in order to produce high strength glass ceramics with good optical properties.

Alumina is the most commonly used type of ceramic and is available in purities up to 99 9. Alumina is also widely used in engineered ceramics also called advanced or technical ceramics. It is ideal for wear resistant inserts or products. Annual world production of aluminium oxide in 2015 was approximately 115 million tonnes over 90 of which is used in the manufacture of aluminium metal.

These engineered ceramic materials are formulated for especially harsh applications that require increased wear resistance thermal and chemical stability and many of the other characteristics alumina possesses. It has the same sintered crystal body as sapphire and ruby.