Homemade alloys

I don't have any good ideas yet, but I am also interested in home made experimental alloys.

I'm looking for an inexpensive kiln specially made for small samples (metals, ceramics, what not). The ideal kiln would:

1. small: the size of a toaster, sample crucible no bigger than a few cm3
2. Accurate temperature reading
3. computer controlled temperature ramp up, hold, and ramp down
4. inert atmosphere, or low pressure

I'd design it myself but I'd rather not reinvent the wheel.

these gizmos look interesting:

-Scott

They actually use two different alloys. One for the walls and one for the lids and bottom. The walls are 3004 alloy which is a manganese addition. And the lids are 5182 which is a magnesium addition.

Sleepy

this looks nice... when working with reactive materials like Al and you don't want any oxide you need a good atmosphere. It is "easy" to build an appropriate vacuum chamber by yourself. A rotary pump going down to

1e-2 torr is fine if you continuously purge the chamber with inert gas. just make sure that your inert gas supply is several magnitudes higher than the leaks in the system :-) If you need even lower O2 partial pressures, add a gas purifier cartridge to the supply line to remove last traces oxygen from the inert gas.

before heating and final pressure adjustment perform at least three cycles pumping the chamber down and venting again with inert gas.

add a good PID controller with a DC power supply to heat the crucibles and everything should suit your needs.

I heated titanium alloys for several hours to 1200 K in such a controlled atmosphere at 0.1 torr and it worked perfectly. No signs of oxidation. Just using the gas from the bottle at atmospheric pressure was not good enough.

check the ellingham diagram for your requirements:

don't forget that kinetics are also a big issue. You may never get to thermodynamic stability for Al in a homemade system. But the it is sufficient if the oxidation is so slow that it dosn't matter.

good luck Andreas Rutz

Ah thats great to know, so if I mix them together, how close is that to 2024 alloy ?

About seven miles.

The critical alloying element for 2024 is copper, not magnesium or manganese.

There must be some available resources for you on alloy compositions.

Unless you like mising molten metlas to see what comes out.

Jim

steve mew wrote: