The Use Of Heat Treatment To Change Metal Properties
The Use Of Heat Treatment To Change Metal Properties
About 75 per cent of the periodic table consists of metals the others being gasses and chemicals. The table is expanding all the time with 15 metals added since the middle of the 20th Century and half a dozen in the pipeline waiting to be confirmed.
The vast majority of these metals have to be fired to be extracted from the original ore. As we continue to discover more and more about the remarkable state of Mesopotamia which straddles what is now a large part of several Eastern Mediterranean and Arabic countries, it hardly comes as a surprise to know that the first known metal used by man was here and that metal was copper. This discovery is thought to have occurred in the 9th Century B.C and artefacts have been found made of copper which have been dated back to the 6th Century B.C.
All metals have unique properties and this uniqueness can be further enhanced with the mix of one or more other metals to create alloys. Values of metals, especially precious metals and some of the rare earth metals is a volatile business. Precious metal dealers have to sometimes have nerves of steel if they hold real stock of some of these commodities.
Most people consider gold to be the most valuable metal when it is not. The platinum group of metals which some refer to as white gold consists of Platinum, Palladium, Rhodium, Ruthenium, Osmium and Iridium. People would be right to think that gold is a safer bet to buy than any of these other metals as gold tends to steadily rise in value and very rarely fall unlike Rhodium for instance which during the late 1990's fluctuated between a few hundred dollars an ounce to twelve thousand dollars an ounce and back to today's two thousand three hundred dollars an ounce. In the 1990s gold was never more than a few hundred dollars an ounce.
It is also wrong to think of 'pure gold' as there is no such thing. All metals have impurities in various degrees. One manufacturer of gold bullion claims to have reached the very highest level of purity with a product which is 99.9 per cent pure.
In the 16th Century the Spaniards mining silver in Columbia thought of the platinum group of metals, (PGM), as an impurity to the silver. They named this group of metals after the word meaning 'little silver' in Spanish and threw most of it away. Both Incas and Spaniards were guilty of producing forged gold coins which consisted of platinum covered with a thin layer of gold. The irony is of course that Platinum is now worth more than gold.
None of these metals would exist without the knowledge of heat treatment. Getting the metal from ore can only be done with heat for nearly, but not quite all, metals. All metals have their own melting point and this can vary by over a thousand degree difference.
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