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There are 140 million tons of nickel-containing serpentine mines in Tuquan County, Inner Mongolia, China. There is no industrial practice in the world to extract magnesium metal from magnesium silicate minerals. Laboratory research shows that it is difficult to extract magnesium metal from serpentine. Based on our laboratory research, an industrial demonstration production line with an annual processing capacity of 21,000 tons of ore has been constructed. Especially the continuous vacuum metal magnesium reduction furnace developed by ourselves is stable and reliable, which proves its feasibility. From ore crushing, grinding, ball pressing, reduction, to metal magnesium refining and casting ingots, the entire production line is fully continuous and automated. The production process has no carbon dioxide emission, clean production, high production efficiency, and low cost, which lays the foundation for large-scale industrialization of extracting magnesium metal from serpentine.

A new method of making sodium metal from sodium sulfate is discussed. Anhydrous sodium sulfate as may be made from sodium sulfate waste solutions is reduced with aluminum metal. The reactor design to make sodium metal along with aluminum and sulfur oxides minimizing wastes is explored. Thermochemical tools are used in this development. Experiments carried out in this regard and how they fit the thermochemistry are evaluated in this paper.

At present, the global production of 45,000 tons of lithium is obtained by molten salt electrolysis using lithium chloride as a raw material. Due to the release of chlorine gas in the production process, the environment is seriously polluted and the energy consumption is high. In this paper, lithium carbonate is used as a raw material, and aluminum powder is used as a reducing agent to extract metal lithium in a vacuum reduction furnace by aluminothermic reduction. The lithium recovery rate is 85% and the purity of metal lithium reaches 99.5%. In the laboratory, a continuous vacuum lithium reduction furnace was developed. No harmful gases were released during the entire production process. It was environmentally friendly. The production of lithium by aluminothermic reduction is a very promising method. The continuous lithium vacuum reduction furnace is the key equipment of this process, which lays the foundation for future industrial application.

There are expectations that hydrogen when produced economically will act as a clean fuel. This paper analyzes the ramifications on this perception. Thermochemical computations are made to show what may happen during combustion of hydrogen and associated reactions in this analysis.

During the 1990s Powerball Industries, UT had demonstrated producing Hydrogen on demand machinery—where encapsulated sodium metal is reacted with water to release hydrogen gas under pressure. The hydrogen on demand has several applications. Here we discuss the ongoing research of making use of aluminum (recycled or newly produced) with anhydrous sodium sulfate—which will make sodium metal, sulfur oxides, and aluminum oxide. The thermodynamic analysis shows suitable physicochemical conditions for the reactions. Preliminary economics using aluminum scrap—recycled aluminum is shown.

Graphene, the nanosheets isolated since 2004, has increased the scientific and technological curiosity worldwide. Attempts to make large-scale graphene and applications thereof have been having exponential rise during the past 10 years, like Moore’s law of computer memory chips. Synthetic graphite has been known for 120 years, which also had seen strides of improvements in its properties. In this paper, a plausible connection is made to show the possible presence of graphene in the structures of varieties of synthetic graphite.

In China’s Inner Mongolia Tuquan County, 1.4 billion tons of reserves of serpentine deposits were found. Because serpentine belongs to magnesium silicate, there is no good reducing agent to reduce magnesium. In the local there is also a large reserves of high-aluminum bituminous coal for thermal power, power plants each year produce a large number of high-aluminum fly ash. The aluminum-silicon alloys obtained from this high-aluminum fly ash as the raw material by carbothermal reduction method can reduce the magnesium from the serpentine. In this paper, first, the feasibility of producing aluminum-silicon alloys by carbothermal reduction of high-alumina fly ash was studied, the hypereutectic aluminum-silicon alloys were obtained; and then the investigation on aluminum-silicon alloy as a reducing agent to reduce of metal magnesium from serpentine was carried out. According to the previous investigation, the optimized technical process for the extraction of metal magnesium from serpentine was proposed.

Extractive metallurgy has used free or combined sulfur as both the raw material and the energy material in carrying out economical manufacture of several metals in millions of tons per year quantities over the past century. This has controlled carbon emissions in an unintentional fashion and out of necessity as the ores in many cases have been sulfides to start with. And the benefits of heat generation by the sulfides reacting with oxygen in the process steps have avoided the use of carbon as a fuel in providing the reaction temperatures. In this article, we will show the inherent benefits of “thiometallurgy,” which uses sulfur in the extraction of metals in alleviating CO2 and water vapor–greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, as well as its ability to provide a cost-effective energy material solution. Such solutions are not only applicable to existing base metal production but, as the authors will show, also are applicable to newer processes in the production of other metals and chemicals, such as alkaline earth metals, titanium, and to an extent aluminum in an indirect fashion. Iron ores can also be treated with thiometallurgy to meet the ULCOS criterion of ultra-low carbon dioxide steel being studied in Europe. The concept of generating “thiopower” as an alternative energy approach is also introduced by the authors.

Common fuels—whether they are simple hydrocarbons or oxygenated hydrocarbons or carbohydrates—can be economically produced from the respective oxides of carbon and hydrogen by simple chemical reductions. These reactions are efficiently carried out by applying fundamentals of the reduction process.

In 1939, Dow Chemical had advertisements discussing the use of magnesium for trains, following their successful use of Dowmetal truck bodies in 1935. Despite the fact that the concept of using magnesium (Mg) alloys in trains has existed for at least 75 years, their remains significant challenges in alloy development and forming technologies before commercial application will find mass application.

The role of minerals in biomass formation is understood only to a limited extent. When the term “photosynthesis—CO2 and H2O reduction of sugars, using solar energy”—is used, one normally thinks of chlorophyll as a compound containing magnesium. Alkali and alkaline earth metals present in leaf cells in the form of ions are equally essential in this solar energy bioconversion coupled with nitrogen fixation. Application of some of these principles can lead to artificial carbon-neutral processes on an industrial scale close to the concentrated CO2 emission sources.

The analysis of recently announced battery packs for plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEV) shows that the design of the series-parallel combinations is being over-complicated. The proven energy densities of lithium-ion cells from about 200 Wh/kg are being reduced to 90 Wh/kg. The majority of the weight increase seems to be for thermal management. Simpler battery pack designs based on electro-refining pot rooms using self-contained rectangular lithium-ion cells with air cooling inside of die-cast magnesium cell tanks would help avoid hauling dead weight in PHEV by providing considerable weight reduction.

The Magnesium Technology Symposium, which takes place every year at the TMS Annual Meeting & Exhibition, is one of the largest yearly gatherings of magnesium specialists in the world. Papers are presented in all aspects of the field, ranging from primary production to applications to recycling. Moreover, papers explore everything from basic research findings to industrialization. Magnesium Technology 2011 covers a broad spectrum of current topics, including alloys and their properties; cast products and processing; wrought products and processing; forming, joining, and machining; corrosion and surface finishing; ecology; and structural applications. In addition, you'll find coverage of new and emerging applications in such areas as biomedicine and hydrogen storage. © 2011 The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society. All rights reserved.

In conventional investment casting process of aluminium alloys for the application of the aerospace industry, to assure the quality of the final casting, usually the foundry uses large runner system which results in low yield, high energy consumption and high GHGs emission. In one case of this investigation, the yield is between 5 ~ 10% which means that the current casting process wastes large amount of energy and generates lots of scraps. By applying a new casting method, the bulky runner system and the melting/holding time are significantly reduced, the quality of the casting is improved, and in the meantime the related energy consumption and GHGs emission are significantly decreased. In the investigation, the energy efficiencies and GHGs emission between the current and traditional processes are calculated and compared.