Alumina Solution

Alumina Solution is a fluid solution of Bauxite and Water. It is only used to produce Aluminum Scrap for further processing.

Tips

 * The aluminum production is a looping recipe both using and producing Water. To prevent the recycled Water from backing up and clogging the setup, Pipeline systems for fresh and recycled Water and connected Refinery setups should be separated.
 * For example: a setup utilizing 480 Bauxite/min producing 822.85 Aluminum Scrap/min consumes 685.71 m of Water/min but produces 137.14 of it at the end, which means that only 548.57 m of Water should be extracted. Therefore, there should be two setups for producing Alumina Solution, one solely from fresh Water (5.49 Refineries) and the other one solely from recycled Water (1.38). If underclocking is preferred over overclocking, there will be 8 Refineries in total. Alumina Solution from both sources is then mixed and processed in 2.29 Refineries into Scrap.
 * Alternatively to the above, if the Water Extractors serving the aluminum plant are below the plant, the recycled water can be handled simply by injecting it into the main water supply through a Pipeline Pump. The pump's superior head lift (20 meters vs 10, plus a higher starting point) will give the recycled water priority, even stopping the Water Extractors if necessary. Note that this only works if the fresh water supply is not powered by a higher-mark pump.
 * An even simpler method would be to feed the recycled water back into the main water supply through a Valve. Make sure that the feedback water is the only line with a valve, since valves can't force a priority when other valves are present.
 * The Silica produced as a byproduct does not suffice for Aluminum Ingot production (using the standard recipe), more of it has to be produced from Raw Quartz. It can be omitted with the Pure Aluminum Ingot alternate recipe, which however reduces ingot yield by 25%.

Trivia

 * The in-game refining process resembles the real-life refining process:
 * Real-life bauxite contains relatively high amounts of silica and even small amounts of titanium.
 * It is crushed into a very fine powder and mixed with water and other chemicals, making alumina slurry.
 * The alumina is extracted via electrolysis.
 * Caustic soda (aka sodium hydroxide) is added to prevent the aluminum from reacting during the smelting process.
 * Alumina is another name for aluminum oxide, Al2O3.

History

 * Patch 0.3: Introduced

Solution d'alumine