Tungsten can be ground, joined, milled, riveted, spun, stamped, and turned, but it must be handled with great care, as it is prone to breaking and is generally an expensive material to work with.
It is brittle at room temperature, and so must be cut/formed well above its transition temperature and cannot be cold-tooled. Tungsten is notoriously difficult to work with while in its impure state, as it’s low ductility predisposes it to shatter. There are, therefore, many tungsten alloys (explained further in our article on the types of tungsten alloys), as well as many other metals such as steel and aluminum that benefit from the addition of tungsten to them. When alloyed with other metals, tungsten can provide some of these properties to the resulting alloy, especially its high strength and resilience. These includes excellent high temperature resilience, the lowest expansion coefficient of any metal, the highest melting point of any metal (3370☌/6100☏), the lowest vapor pressure of any metal, high moduli of compression and elasticity, good electrical conductivity, and a high density (19.25 g/cm 3), just to name a few. Since then, it has become increasingly important to the field of material science, as it shows some interesting and valuable properties. Originally dubbed ‘wolfram’ in 1779, tungsten (tung sten, or “heavy stone” in Swedish) is a dense metal first isolated in the late 1700s. Tungsten and its alloys are prized for their strength and stability over temperature. By doing so, this article aims to help designers make more informed material choices, as well as show the unique characteristics of these advanced metals.
Both forms can be found in numerous applications, and this article will help distinguish each type of tungsten from the other by comparing the physical, mechanical, and working properties of each. Tungsten can act as both an alloy base and an alloying element, and this article will compare elemental tungsten with its most common alloy, tungsten carbide. This silvery-white lustrous metal is becoming more present in the industry thanks to the alloying process – that is, the ability to add metallic elements together to create new, improved materials known as alloys. Tungsten, element 74 of the periodic table, has come a long way since its early use as a material for filaments in lightbulbs.
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