Aluminum Oxide

One of aluminium oxide’s advantages as a sandblasting media is the wide range of sizes it comes in. It is available anywhere from a fine powder to a coarse grit. This means that aluminium oxide gets used for anything from frosting glass for decorative purposes to preparing hydraulic shafts for hard chrome plating. Besides hardness and strength, the other advantage of aluminium oxide as a sandblasting media is its angular shape. This means that it creates a deep sharp profile in the surface being coated. This is an advantage when applying specialized coatings such as hard chrome, which require a surface such as this to anchor into.

Aluminium oxide is the chemical name for alumina, a material which, when further refined, produces aluminum. Manufacturing and maintenance facilities use aluminium oxide as a sandblasting media because of its hardness and strength. As having a hardness just lower than diamond on the Mohs scale, aluminium oxide will remove most contaminants. Aluminium oxide’s strength means that, upon impact, it spends its kinetic energy on removing contaminants, not in breaking up.