Amalgam – Material Table – Applications – Price

About Amalgam

An amalgam is an alloy of mercury with another metal. It may be a liquid, a soft paste or a solid, depending upon the proportion of mercury.

Summary

Name	Amalgam
Phase at STP	solid
Density	14000 kg/m3
Ultimate Tensile Strength	70 MPa
Yield Strength	N/A
Young’s Modulus of Elasticity	40 GPa
Brinell Hardness	120 BHN
Melting Point	227 °C
Thermal Conductivity	23 W/mK
Heat Capacity	210 J/g K
Price	150 $/kg

Composition of Amalgam

Low-copper amalgam commonly consists of mercury (50%), silver (~22–32%), tin (~14%), zinc (~8%) and other trace metals. High-copper amalgam includes 40-60% silver, 27-30% tin and 13-30% copper and 1% zinc set with mercury.

Applications of Amalgam

Silver-mercury amalgams are important in dentistry, and gold-mercury amalgam is used in the extraction of gold from ore. Dentistry has used alloys of mercury with metals such as silver, copper, indium, tin and zinc. By adding copper, the tin-mercury phase is eliminated and modern dental amalgams are made by mixing silver-tin-copper alloy powder with mercury. This results in fillings that resist both the mechanical and chemical onslaughts within the mouth for many years.

Mechanical Properties of Amalgam

Strength of Amalgam

In mechanics of materials, the strength of a material is its ability to withstand an applied load without failure or plastic deformation. Strength of materials basically considers the relationship between the external loads applied to a material and the resulting deformation or change in material dimensions. In designing structures and machines, it is important to consider these factors, in order that the material selected will have adequate strength to resist applied loads or forces and retain its original shape.

Strength of a material is its ability to withstand this applied load without failure or plastic deformation. For tensile stress, the capacity of a material or structure to withstand loads tending to elongate is known as ultimate tensile strength (UTS). Yield strength or yield stress is the material property defined as the stress at which a material begins to deform plastically whereas yield point is the point where nonlinear (elastic + plastic) deformation begins. In case of tensional stress of a uniform bar (stress-strain curve), the Hooke’s law describes behaviour of a bar in the elastic region. The Young’s modulus of elasticity is the elastic modulus for tensile and compressive stress in the linear elasticity regime of a uniaxial deformation and is usually assessed by tensile tests.

See also: Strength of Materials

Ultimate Tensile Strength of Amalgam

Ultimate tensile strength of Amalgam is 70 MPa.

Yield Strength of Amalgam

Yield strength of Amalgam is N/A.

Modulus of Elasticity of Amalgam

The Young’s modulus of elasticity of Amalgam is 40 GPa.

Hardness of Amalgam

In materials science, hardness is the ability to withstand surface indentation (localized plastic deformation) and scratching. Brinell hardness test is one of indentation hardness tests, that has been developed for hardness testing. In Brinell tests, a hard, spherical indenter is forced under a specific load into the surface of the metal to be tested.

The Brinell hardness number (HB) is the load divided by the surface area of the indentation. The diameter of the impression is measured with a microscope with a superimposed scale. The Brinell hardness number is computed from the equation:

Brinell hardness of Amalgam is approximately 120 BHN (converted).

See also: Hardness of Materials

Thermal Properties of Amalgam

Amalgam – Melting Point

Melting point of Amalgam is 227 °C.

Note that, these points are associated with the standard atmospheric pressure. In general, melting is a phase change of a substance from the solid to the liquid phase. The melting point of a substance is the temperature at which this phase change occurs. The melting point also defines a condition in which the solid and liquid can exist in equilibrium. For various chemical compounds and alloys, it is difficult to define the melting point, since they are usually a mixture of various chemical elements.

Amalgam – Thermal Conductivity

Thermal conductivity of Amalgam is 23 W/(m·K).

The heat transfer characteristics of a solid material are measured by a property called the thermal conductivity, k (or λ), measured in W/m.K. It is a measure of a substance’s ability to transfer heat through a material by conduction. Note that Fourier’s law applies for all matter, regardless of its state (solid, liquid, or gas), therefore, it is also defined for liquids and gases.

The thermal conductivity of most liquids and solids varies with temperature. For vapors, it also depends upon pressure. In general:

Most materials are very nearly homogeneous, therefore we can usually write k = k (T). Similar definitions are associated with thermal conductivities in the y- and z-directions (ky, kz), but for an isotropic material the thermal conductivity is independent of the direction of transfer, kx = ky = kz = k.

Amalgam – Specific Heat

Specific heat of Amalgam is 210 J/g K.

Specific heat, or specific heat capacity, is a property related to internal energy that is very important in thermodynamics. The intensive properties c_v and c_p are defined for pure, simple compressible substances as partial derivatives of the internal energy u(T, v) and enthalpy h(T, p), respectively:

where the subscripts v and p denote the variables held fixed during differentiation. The properties c_v and c_p are referred to as specific heats (or heat capacities) because under certain special conditions they relate the temperature change of a system to the amount of energy added by heat transfer. Their SI units are J/kg K or J/mol K.

Properties and prices of other materials

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