The present lecture is intended to introduce the research works done by the various investigators, concerning on the production of aluminium by means of thermal reduction with carbon.
After brief introduction, the possibitily of the reduction of alumina with carbon has been treated theoretically and the energy consumption for the production of crude aluminium has also been illustrated.
In the third section, so-called carbide process invented by E. Grünert has been introduced and the semiindustrial furnaces for the production or for the decomposition of aluminium carbide, which are proposed by the Pechiney-Ugine group, has been described.
In the fourth section, various methods of extraction of aluminium from thermally reduced crude aluminium alloy, ie. method of distillation, method of separation of the liquid phase centrifugally, method of extraction of aluminium using zinc, magnesium, mercury and lead as the solvent, method of extraction of aluminium as aluminium subchloride and method of electrolysis, have been introduced.