How useful is tungsten?
What does tungsten do when you talk about it? Perhaps everyone is familiar with it, because when we were young, we heard the story of Edison's improvement of the electric light bulb. In order to find the right material for the filament, no matter how many times he failed, he did not give up. He experimented with more than 3,000 kinds of conductive materials, and finally decided to use tungsten to make the filament.
What most of us have learned from this story is that Edison never gave up no matter how many times he failed, but there is more to the story. Although the electric lamp had been made at that time, due to the poor choice of filament material, the life of the lamp was relatively short, and there was no practical application value, so the lighting equipment at that time was still realized by coal or kerosene.
After Edison used tungsten filament as the lamp filament, the life of the lamp could reach 1000 hours, which is the lamp with practical application value. Coal and kerosene were also hit hard by the advent of tungsten bulbs, with their share prices plummeting by 12%.
So tungsten plays a very important role in social economy. Tungsten as a filament is just a very simple application, because tungsten actually has two characteristics: first, tungsten in the nature of all metal elements, the melting point is the highest, more than 3400℃, above the use of tungsten wire as an electric filament, is the use of its characteristics; Second, the hardness of tungsten in nature is also very high, the status is only second to diamond, in nature is ranked second, but because the main component of diamond is carbon element, it can not replace tungsten in the application sometimes. As long as the two characteristics of tungsten are well used, the scope of tungsten application is also very wide.
Because tungsten has the advantage of high hardness, as long as some steel forging tungsten alloy steel, its hardness can be greatly improved, as early as in the 19th century, German scientists found that adding tungsten into the barrel can prolong the service life; In World War II, the German Tiger tank used tungsten carbide as the shell core, which can not only increase the hardness of the shell, but also increase the power of the shell, so this tank in World War II also left a very deep impression on people.
But in modern times, tungsten has been used more widely. For example in the gas turbine, rockets, missiles and nuclear reactor of some of the key parts and components, in order to can make the equipment can work well, generally need to withstand very high temperatures, other metal material is difficult to do, but high temperature resistant characteristics of tungsten has a natural, so all the equipment which are need to use tungsten.
