Description
Pure aluminum is very soft. If you want to make something stronger but still lightweight, hard-wearing, and able to survive the high temperatures in an airplane or car engine, you mix aluminum and copper. For food packaging, you don’t need anything like the same strength, but you do need a material that’s easy to shape and seal. You get those qualities by alloying aluminum with magnesium. Suppose you want to carry electricity over long distances from power plants to homes and factories. You could use copper, which is generally the best conductor (carrier) of electricity, but it’s heavy and expensive. Aluminum might be an option, but it doesn’t carry electricity so readily. One solution is to make power cables from aluminum alloyed with boron, which conducts electricity almost as well as copper but is a great deal lighter and less droopy on hot days. Typically, aluminum alloys contain 90–99 percent aluminum.