Alloys of the Heavy Metals: An Outline of Recent Developments in a New Branch of Metallurgy Available to Purchase

THIS paper shows briefly the origins and development of a comparatively new and certainly important branch of engineering science. For many years the alloys of the light metals, particularly of aluminium and magnesium, have been developed, until the term “light alloys” has come to be generally accepted as indicating the alloys of the light metals or any metallic alloy having a density of less than about 3·8. Towards the other end of the density scale are now being developed alloys of the heavy metals, mainly tungsten and tantalum. The techniques of production and manufacture of these two groups are very different: whereas the light alloys are produced and manipulated mainly by melting, casting, annealing, and forging, the heavy alloys are produced by various processes of powder metallurgy, resulting in substances with densities of 15 or more.