Which material would work best as "sacrificial material" for melting aluminum powder in a kiln? I need to melt aluminum powder in a kiln, but before it melts it gets oxidized almost completely. My kiln is almost airtight, but it doesn't have inert gas inlet.
Which material would work best as sacrificial material, which would react with oxygen (and water vapor) before aluminum?
You need some oxygen scavengers before you start heating up the system. However, please note that you are going to need a lot of scavengers. To get rid of all the oxygen, you will have to put in a large excess of these scavengers into the chamber.

There is some information on oxygen scavengers on Wikipedia