13 Alloying
Most of the steel found today is “alloy steel”. An alloy is an element that is mixed into the metal during processing. Adding an alloy produces a metal with different physical characteristics. Common alloying elements are Nickel and Chromium and can be added in the furnaces of either the basic oxygen or the electric arc processes.
An alloy is a mixture of chemical elements of which at least one is a metal. Unlike chemical compounds with metallic bases, an alloy will retain all the properties of a metal in the resulting material, such as electrical conductivity, ductility, opacity, and luster, but may have properties that differ from those of the pure metals, such as increased strength or hardness. In some cases, an alloy may reduce the overall cost of the material while preserving important properties. In other cases, the mixture imparts synergistic properties to the constituent metal elements such as corrosion resistance or mechanical strength.
In an alloy, the atoms are joined by metallic bonding rather than by covalent bonds typically found in chemical compounds. The alloy constituents are usually measured by mass percentage for practical applications, and in atomic fraction for basic science studies. Alloys are usually classified as substitutional or interstitial alloys, depending on the atomic arrangement that forms the alloy. They can be further classified as homogeneous (consisting of a single phase), or heterogeneous (consisting of two or more phases) or intermetallic. An alloy may be a solid solution of metal elements (a single phase, where all metallic grains (crystals) are of the same composition) or a mixture of metallic phases (two or more solutions, forming a microstructure of different crystals within the metal).
Examples of alloys include red gold (gold and copper), white gold (gold and silver), sterling silver (silver and copper), steel or silicon steel (iron with non-metallic carbon or silicon respectively), solder, brass, pewter, duralumin, bronze, and amalgams.
Alloys are used in a wide variety of applications, from the steel alloys, used in everything from buildings to automobiles to surgical tools, to exotic titanium alloys used in the aerospace industry, to beryllium-copper alloys for non-sparking tools.
Video explanation
Watch this 4:17 video “Alloy Steel – An Overview” by James Sword Research (2024).
Alloy – Wikipedia Available and accessed 6 February 2024 and The Virtual Machine Shop (2011) Electric Arc Furnace retrieved from the WayBack Machine internet archive 16 January 2024.