Physical metallurgy is the science of making useful products out of metals. Metal parts can be made in a variety of ways, depending on the shape, properties, and cost desired in the finished product. The desired properties may be electrical, mechanical, magnetic, or chemical in nature; all of them can be enhanced by alloying and heat treatment. The cost of a finished part is often determined more by its ease of manufacture than by the cost of the material. This has led to a wide variety of ways to form metals and to an active competition among different forming methods, as well as among different materials. Large parts may be made by casting. Thin products such as automobile fenders are made by forming metal sheets, while small parts are often made by powder metallurgy (pressing powder into a die and sintering it). Usually a metal part has the same properties throughout. However, if only the surface needs to be hard or corrosion-resistant, the desired performance can be obtained through a treatment that changes only the composition and strength of the surface.
Structures and properties of metals
Metallic crystal structures
Metals are used in engineering structures (e.g., automobiles, bridges, pressure vessels) because, in contrast to glass or ceramic, they can undergo appreciable plastic deformation before breaking. This plasticity stems from the simplicity of the arrangement of atoms in the crystals making up a piece of metal and the nondirectional nature of the bond between the atoms. Atoms can be arranged in many different ways in crystalline solids, but in metals the packing is in one of three simple forms. In the most ductile metals, atoms are arranged in a close-packed manner. If atoms were visualized as identical spheres and if these spheres were packed into planes in the closest possible manner, there would be two ways to stack close-packed planes one above another (see ). One would lead to a crystal with hexagonal symmetry (called hexagonal close-packed, or hcp); the other would lead to a crystal with cubic symmetry that could also be visualized as an assembly of cubes with atoms at the corners and at the centre of each face (known as face-centred cubic, or fcc). Examples of metals with the hcp type of structure are magnesium, cadmium, zinc, and alpha titanium. Metals with the fcc structure include aluminum, copper, nickel, gamma iron, gold, and silver.
The third common crystal structure in metals can be visualized as an assembly of cubes with atoms at the corners and an atom in the centre of each cube; this is known as body-centred cubic, or bcc. Examples of metals with the bcc structure are alpha iron, tungsten, chromium, and beta titanium.
Some metals, such as titanium and iron, exhibit different crystal structures at different temperatures. The lowest-temperature structure is labeled alpha (α), and higher-temperature structures beta (β), gamma (γ), and delta (δ). This allotropy, or transformation from one structure to another with changing temperature, leads to the marked changes in properties that can come from heat treatment (see below Heat treating).
When a metal undergoes a phase change from liquid to solid or from one crystal structure to another, the transformation begins with the nucleation and growth of many small crystals of the new phase. All these crystals, or grains, have the same structure but different orientations, so that, when they finally grow together, boundaries form between the grains. These boundaries play an important role in determining the properties of a piece of metal. At room temperature they strengthen the metal without reducing its ductility, but at high temperatures they often weaken the structure and lead to early failure. They can be the site of localized corrosion, which also leads to failure.
Mechanical properties
When a metal rod is lightly loaded, the strain (measured by the change in length divided by the original length) is proportional to the stress (the load per unit of cross-sectional area). This means that, with each increase in load, there is a proportional increase in the rod’s length, and, when the load is removed, the rod shrinks to its original size. The strain here is said to be elastic, and the ratio of stress to strain is called the elastic modulus. If the load is increased further, however, a point called the yield stress will be reached and exceeded. Strain will now increase faster than stress, and, when the sample is unloaded, a residual plastic strain (or elongation) will remain. The elastic strain at the yield stress is typically 0.1 to 1 percent, whereas, with the sample pulled to rupture, the plastic strain is typically 20 to 40 percent for an alloy (it may exceed 100 percent in some cases).
The most important mechanical properties of a metal are its yield stress, its ductility (measured by the elongation to fracture), and its toughness (measured by the energy absorbed in tearing the metal). The yield stress of a metal is determined by the resistance to slipping of one plane of atoms over another. Various barriers to slip can be produced by heat treatment and alloying; examples of such barriers are grain boundaries, fine precipitates, distortion introduced by cold working the metal, and alloying elements dissolved in the metal.
When a metal is made very strong through one or more of these methods, it may suddenly fracture under a load instead of yielding. This is particularly true when the metal contains notches or cracks that locally raise the stress and localize the yielding. The property of interest then becomes the fracture toughness, measured by the energy required to extend an existing crack in a piece of metal. In almost all cases, the fracture toughness of an alloy can be improved only by reducing its yield strength. The only exception to this is a smaller grain size, which increases both toughness and strength.
Electrical properties
The electrical conductivity of a metal (or its reciprocal, electrical resistivity) is determined by the ease of movement of electrons past the atoms under the influence of an electric field. This movement is particularly easy in copper, silver, gold, and aluminum—all of which are well-known conductors of electricity. The conductivity of a given metal is decreased by phenomena that deflect, or scatter, the moving electrons. These can be anything that destroys the local perfection of the atomic arrangement—for example, impurity atoms, grain boundaries, or the random oscillation of atoms induced by thermal energy. This last example explains why the conductivity of a metal increases substantially with falling temperature: in a pure metal at room temperature, most resistance to the motion of free electrons comes from the thermal vibration of the atoms; if the temperature is reduced to almost absolute zero, where thermal motion essentially stops, conductivity can increase several thousandfold.
Magnetic properties
When an electric current is passed through a coil of metal wire, a magnetic field is developed around the coil. When a piece of copper is placed inside the coil, this field increases by less than 1 percent, but, when a piece of iron, cobalt, or nickel is placed inside the coil, the external field can increase 10,000 times. This strong magnetic property is known as ferromagnetism, and the three metals listed above are the most prominent ferromagnetic metals. When the piece of ferromagnetic metal is removed from the coil, it retains some of this magnetism (that is, it is magnetized). If the metal is hard, as in a hardened piece of steel, the loss, or reversal, of magnetization will be slow, and the sample will be useful as a permanent magnet. If the metal is soft, it will quickly lose its magnetism; this will make it useful in electrical transformers, where rapid reversal of magnetization is essential.
In many types of solids, the atoms possess a permanent magnetic moment (they act like small bar magnets). In most solids, the direction of these moments is arranged at random. What is exceptional about ferromagnetic solids is that the interatomic forces cause the moments of neighbouring atoms spontaneously to align in the same direction. If the moments of all of the atoms in a single sample lined up in the same direction, the sample would be an exceptionally strong magnet with exceptionally high energy. That energy would be reduced if the sample broke up into domains, with all atomic moments in each domain being aligned but the direction of magnetization in adjacent domains being in opposite directions and thus tending to cancel one another. This is what happens when a ferromagnetic metal is magnetized: all domains do not take on the same orientation, but domains of one orientation grow at the expense of others. The alignment of atomic magnetic moments within a domain is weakened by thermally induced oscillations, and ferromagnetism is finally lost above the Curie point, which is 770° C (1,420° F) for iron and 358° C (676° F) for nickel.
Chemical properties
Almost any metal will oxidize in air, the only exception being gold. At room temperature a clean metal surface will oxidize very little, since a thin oxide film forms and protects the metal from further oxidation. At elevated temperatures, though, oxidation is faster, and the film is less protective. Many chemicals accelerate this corrosion process (that is, the conversion of a metal to an oxide in air or to a hydroxide in the presence of water).
A special property of metal surfaces is their ability to catalyze chemical reactions. For example, in the exhaust system of most automobiles, combustion gases pass over a dispersion of very fine platinum particles. The surfaces of these particles greatly accelerate the oxidation of carbon monoxide and hydrocarbons to carbon dioxide and water, thus reducing the toxicity of the exhaust gases.