Question

What is the chief impurity present in red bauxite?

Answer 1

We have to know that red bauxite is known as red mud. Red mud is made out of a combination of strong and metallic oxides. The red tone emerges from iron oxides, which can contain up to 60% of the mass. The mud is profoundly fundamental with a pH going from 10 to 13. Other than iron, the other prevailing parts incorporate silica, unleashed residual aluminum mixtures, and titanium oxide.

Complete answer:
Red mud is a side-product of the Bayer interaction, the chief methods for refining bauxite on the way to alumina. The subsequent alumina is the crude material for delivering aluminum by the Hall–Héroult method. A run of the mill bauxite plant produces one to two fold the amount of red mud as alumina. This proportion is reliant upon the sort of bauxite utilized in the refining cycle and the extraction conditions.
The fundamental constituents of the residue after the extraction of the aluminum segment are insoluble metallic oxides. The level of these oxides delivered by a specific alumina processing plant will rely upon the quality and nature of the bauxite mineral and the extraction conditions. In general, the creation of the residue mirrors that of the non-aluminum segments, except for part of the silicon segment: glasslike silica (quartz) won't respond yet a portion of the silica present, frequently named, receptive silica, will respond under the extraction conditions and structure sodium aluminum silicate just as other related mixtures.
When the amount of iron oxide is more in the pre, then the residue is known as red bauxite. The chief impurity present in red bauxite is iron oxide. The percentage of iron oxide in red bauxite is $5 - 60\%$.

Note:
We have to remember the primary difference between red bauxite and white bauxite. In red bauxite, the mass percentage of iron oxide would be more and in white bauxite, the mass percentage of silica would be more. In ore of bauxite, the common impurities present are iron oxide and silica.