Why Are Steel Alloys Created?
Why are Steel Alloys Created?
Alloys are created to give added strength and other much needed properties to steels. An alloy is made up of two or more elements with at least one being a metal. Elements need combining with others to produce harder, stronger materials due to their own structure being softer and weaker in their pure form.
Image Credit: Nature / Jeroen van den Brink – Alberto F. Morpu
Each element is made up of atoms. These atoms vary in size and shape depending on the element. They are uniform (of equal size) and can shift/slip over each other when subjected to an external force.
Pure metals made up of a single element (such as gold, for example) are relatively soft and therefore weak in structure.
Therefore elements mixed together to form alloys, contain atoms of different sizes, which distort the regular arrangements of atoms.
This makes it more difficult for the layers to slide over each other, so alloys become harder than the pure single element metal due to the new strong, rigid structure. Creating different alloy steels enables an extremely wide range of uses for a wide range of applications.
