Question #9abed
1 Answer
Metallurgy is the branch of science that studies the properties of metals and metallic alloys. For example, it's thanks to metallurgy that we know how to create different steels that fit our needs.
Explanation:
Metals, thanks to the very nature of the metallic bonding (the electrons are not shared between pairs of atoms, but spread through the whole volume of the metal) has two very important properties:
-They conduct electricity.
-They are not rigid, and they are malleable.
These properties can furthermore be tuned and refined into the properties we need (for whatever technological end) by mixing them with other metals or with impurity atoms (doping).
An example of this tuning is the search for better steels: Since the use of iron became widespread, the weaknesses of this metal were only overcome by its abundancy. Iron was quite brittle, and could not withstand a lot of mechanical abuse. This could be overcome by the technique called "folding", which is know known to involve the creation of many lattice defects in the crystalline structure of the iron. This made it much harder. But it was a long and arduous process, not apt for mass production.
The first steels were discovered by chance, when laying the iron that was to be worked directly on the red-hot coals. This allowed some carbon atoms to seep into the iron, producing a steel of irregular and random quality. Finding out the correct ratios of carbon-to-iron to obtain steels of different hardness was pretty much the birth of metallurgy.
