Abstract
As a problem of the Hall-Heroult process, which is the most widely accepted smelting method of aluminum, it is mentioned that the smelting cost is higher than that of other metals because it consumes a large amount of electric power. For this reason, several other methods were targeted and as a new smelting method to replace the Hall-Heroult process, but it has not been industrialized yet. We have used plasma that can be expected to generate non-equilibrium reaction at low temperature. In the previous research, Inoue and his co-workers attempted the reduction of aluminum oxide by hydrogen plasma. After the plasma irradiation, it was confirmed that the aluminum oxide was reduced since the electric resistance of the specimen surface was markedly decreased, and the research is still underway. In the present research, we have adopted hydrocarbon, acetylene, as plasma to irradiate, and as fundamental study to develop another smelting method that is lower in cost than the Hall-Heroult process, we have tried to reduce aluminum oxide to aluminum with hydrocarbon plasma.
