20 Jun
2001
20 Jun
'01
12:31 p.m.
At 07:48 PM 6/20/01 +0000, Pete wrote:
But aluminium oxide is Al203 and it's a white
powder. Or a rather
attractive (and, yes, very hard) crystal, known as carborundum, ruby,
emerald, amethyst, etc depending on the impurities :-) The only place
you'd get AlO2 (which is also white/clear, by the way) is as aluminate ions
in solution.
My aluminum CDs oxidize black, my aluminum sailboat rigging used to,
(before I got rid of it), aluminum cans that I tried to melt at one point
also turned into the a black form of the Aluminum oxide powder. Perhaps
there are other impurities in it that change its color, I don't know, I
just observe. Now is someone had a classic HP spectrometer I suppose I
could put this stuff in there and see what it said it was. :-)
--Chuck