Your article on the Columbia space shuttle disaster attracted a letter from David Harris of the Aluminium Federation regarding the supposed non-flammability of aluminium (19 April, p 24). He states authoritatively: "Your article raises the spectre of aluminium burning. This is a mythhellip;I have never seen aluminium burning in any formhellip;and nor do I ever expect to."
This is contrary to my experience. Aluminium does burn, and surprisingly (with relevance to the shuttle) it can do so in near-vacuum conditions. Several years ago, against the accepted knowledge of experts in the field, I devised a process that achieves this, operating at a pressure of around 10
In a large vacuum chamber, aluminium wire is continuously melted, vaporised, and burnt in a stream of oxygen, and deposits a coating of aluminium oxide onto a web of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) film moving past at high speed from reel ...
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