What is an alloy?

Hello and welcome to the Naked Science Scrapbook from the naked scientists. This time
we're answering the question “What is an alloy?“. Almost every piece of metal we use in our
daily lives is an alloy - whether it's the wheels of our cars, the cutlery we eat with or even the
jewelry we wear - but what are alloys and how are they made.

Alloys are essentially mixtures of a base metal and one or more additional elements.
Combining metals like this produces a material with very different properties to the individual
metals on their own. And this technology isn't new. In fact, humans have been making and
using alloys for thousands of years. The very earliest example is bronze - an alloy of copper
and tin that started being produced around five thousand years ago. Adding tin to the copper
reduces the melting point and results in a stronger, harder product that's easier to cast and is
better for turning into tools and weapons than copper on its own. After its discovery, the
benefits of bronze meant that its use was so widely adopted that it gave its name to that area
of human history the Bronze Age. Another example of an alloy is solder - a low melting point
alloy of lead and tin that's used to connect components on electronic circuit boards and to join
copper pipes together around the house. And where strength is a priority, steel (which is a
mixture of iron and carbon with trace amounts of a few other metals) is hard to beat. Alloying
can also prevent metals from corroding. Stainless steel, which is made by mixing steel and
chromium, is protected from corrosion by a thin layer of chromium oxide that forms on the
surface and because it won't rust it can be used for anything from cutlery to car parts. Another
important use of alloys today is in turbine blades for the jet engines that power the airplanes
that take us on holiday. Nickel aluminium alloys have been used for this purpose since Frank
Whittle's earliest designs in the 1940s because nickel is light and has a high melting point
meaning it can withstand the high temperatures inside the engine.

The added aluminium also makes the alloy lighter and stronger. But why should adding a
small amount of another element alter the properties of a metal so dramatically? It's all down
to changes that happen between the atoms in the alloy. To see why adding aluminum to nickel
makes this alloy stronger, let's take a look at what happens on an atomic level.
First of all, this is the molecular structure of a metal. It forms a regular crystal lattice with
planes about of atoms all lined up neatly. You can also see similar crystal structures in grains
of salt and gemstones like quartz. Sometimes when you melt and then re-solidify a metal, the
planes of atoms don't quite all line back up again giving an extra half plane. This is called
dislocation. As the atoms are also close together it's possible for the bonding of different
planes to shift. If this shift continues, then the dislocation spreads along the metal until it
reaches an edge, where it creates a de-formation in the metal's shape. This is in fact what's
happening when you bend a piece of metal. Alloying can stop this dislocation from
spreading, making an alloy harder than the metal on its own.

Let's look at the lattice structure of an alloy where some of the base metal atoms have been
replaced with atoms from the added element known as the solute. The solute atoms will have
different bonding properties to the atoms of the base metal and can either repel or attract the
end of the extra half plane, helping to hold it in place, stopping the dislocation in its tracks.
This increased hardness is why much of all modern gold jewelry is not pure gold which would
be far too soft, but in fact alloys of gold with metals like copper, palladium or nickel added to
increase the strength and durability of the pieces. Another way to stop dislocations from
spreading through an alloy is to make sure it's made up of as many tiny crystals as possible by
cooling them quickly once they've been cast. The joints between the crystals which are known
as grain boundaries act like walls that stop the dislocation spreading through the alloy, making
it stronger. This is used to harden the aluminium alloys that make up the alloy wheels in cars.
However at the high temperatures found in a jet engine, these grain boundaries can be a
problem. As the turbine spins at high speed, atoms in the alloy can diffuse through the lattice
to the outer edge, making the blade stretch outwards away from the center. This process is
called creep deformation. If the blade was made up of lots of crystals, the diffusing atoms
could take shortcuts along the grain boundaries accelerating the creek process. So, turbine
blades are made so that they're formed of just one giant crystal. This means there are no grain
boundaries, so the atoms diffuse much more slowly and there's less creek. So, grain
boundaries can be good or bad - depending on what you're planning to do with your alloy.

Another property of alloys that can also be good or bad is the uneven distribution of the
additional elements throughout the base metal. As an alloy solidifies, the additional elements -
the solutes - become less soluble in the base metal. So, you end up with crystals of base
metal suspended in an increasingly concentrated solute liquid. It's a bit like like trying to
freeze seawater. As the water freezes into ice, the water left over becomes more and more
salty. This can be a good thing and is exploited in some aluminium alloys and steals to block
dislocations and improve strength, but it can also be a problem and in these cases the alloy is
reheated slightly to encourage the solutes to be more evenly distributed. So, we make alloys to
change the properties of metals to suit the jobs we need them for. They can change the way
the crystal lattices alloys behave to alter hardness, strength and melting point. Predicting what
properties different combinations of base metals and solute you will have, however, is still
pretty difficult and current practice is still based on what we know about the properties of
current existing alloys. But, researchers are now developing complex computer models that
are helping us to develop even stronger and more efficient alloys for the future That's it for
this time.