It all starts with bauxite, a seemingly ordinary ore that is actually the main raw material for aluminium oxide production. Bauxite is converted into alumina by the Bayer process. Subsequently, the alumina is transformed into aluminium ingots during the electrolysis process.
The production of ingots is only the beginning, the real transformation is in the subsequent processing. After the ingots have been added to specific ingredients, they go through a complex process of melting furnaces, static furnaces, degassing tanks, filtration tanks, casting and rolling mills, shearing and crimping, resulting in large rolls of embryonic aluminium sheets, which we call cast billets.
| Alloy | 1000, 3000, 8000 series |
| Temper | Soft HO (h0), H18, H19, H22, H24, H26, etc |
| Width | 100mm - 1300mm |
| Thickness | 0.01mm - 0.2mm |
| Core ID | 76mm or 152mm |
| Coil OD | max 800mm |
| Roll weight | 100kg/roll - 900kg/roll |
| Surface | Two sides bright |
| Processing method | stamping |
| End use | semi-rigid container used for food packaging after punching. |
These cast billets are approximately 6.5mm to 7.5mm thick and 1.6m to 2.1m in diameter. Next, they are fed into a rolling mill where they are cold rolled several times. As you can imagine this process is like a pasta press, where the aluminium foil is repeatedly rolled thin until it reaches the desired thickness.
After this series of precise processes, the aluminium foil is finally produced in large rolls. These large rolls are then slit and reprocessed to become the familiar small rolls of aluminium foil. Lightweight, durable and easy to handle, they have become indispensable in the modern kitchen.
