Metals And The Fascinating Things About Them

The discovery of metals changed the face of human life. It gave rise to the creation of things such as utensils, tools, weapons, jewelry, and more. Though these were made using stones and clay before, but metals added super strength and longevity to them.

Features

Most metals have the following physical characteristics:

• They are shiny.
• They are hard.
• They have a resistance to stretching.
• They have high melting or boiling points.
• They are dense, heavy for their size.
• They are usually good conductors of heat and electricity.

Various metals have different properties. Some are used mainly to make jewelry, such as gold and silver, while some, like copper, are used to make electrical wires since it has excellent electricity conduction properties. Iron is a very hard metal, and thus is used for making bridges or cars.

Some metals change properties with change in temperatures. For example – mercury is a liquid metal. It solidifies in low temperatures (at around -39 degrees) and becomes a superconductor at the extremely low temperature of -268.8 degrees.

Properties

In terms of usage, copper can be called a super metal. This is because:

    1. It is strong.

    2. It gels easily with devices, such as connectors. 

    3. It is resistant to corrosion.

    4. It is an economical metal.

    5. It is easy to mold and use.

    6. It is ductile and malleable.

Cooper is used to make wires and cables of many types. Over time, many permutations and combinations of this wonder metal have cropped up, such as Tin Coated Copper Wire, Copper Laminated Flexible Connectors, and more. This is because this metal can be used in many different ways, and these new variations help in meeting the requirements of some or the other application.

Benefits

A major benefit of copper wire is it requires less insulation that aluminium. The reason behind this is that aluminium has lower conductivity than copper and thus, to carry the same current, would have to have a larger diameter. At the same time, copper has a higher thermal conductivity than aluminium which allows for greater heat dissipation.

Copper’s strength proves it to be a sturdier metal as compared to aluminium and that’s the reason why it is preferred over it in wiring systems since it can undergo lots of pulling with stretching out. That allows it to remain a safer metal due to better current carrying capacity, better energy and better heat dissipation.

Another amazing aspect of this amazing metal is that it is resistant to ‘creep’ – which is when metals deform under stress. It is also impervious, to a large extent, to breakage. Yet another aspect of copper is while it is strong, it is ductile as well. That is not usually the case. In most instances, the stronger a metal is the lesser pliability it has.

Copper is rather easy to work with and that’s the reason behind its popularity in most areas of industrial and domestic applications.