Zinc Metal And Alloys

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Zinc Metal And Alloys

Zinc is a brittle metal which has a blue cast.  It is readily accessible as it occurs in concentrated ores from which it is easily extracted (it has an abundance of 75 ppm in the earth's crust).  Extraction is achieved by heating the oxide with carbon and distilling out the metal.  Zinc tarnishes in air and reacts with acids and alkalis.  Zinc is used widely throughout industry;   for example, it is used as a galvanic coating on steel to prevent corrosion, and is used as a constituent of various alloy systems (e.g. with copper in brass), as well as in zinc-base alloys which can be used for diecasting (the other alloy constituents are aluminium, copper and magnesium). Pure zinc is used as an electrode in a Daniell cell and also in dry batteries.  Zinc oxide is used as a stabiliser for certain grades of rubbers and plastics, as well as a non-toxic, white pigment used in paint manufacture.   

Zinc oxide also has astringent and soothing qualities and is used as a constituent of creams and ointments. It is somewhat less dense than iron and has a hexagonal crystal structure, with a distorted form of hexagonal close packing, in which each atom has six nearest neighbors (at 265.9 pm) in its own plane and six others at a greater distance of 290.6 pm.  The metal is hard and brittle at most temperatures but becomes malleable between 100 and 150 °C. Above 210 °C, the metal becomes brittle again and can be pulverized by beating.  Zinc is a fair conductor of electricity.  For a metal, zinc has relatively low melting (419.5 °C) and boiling point (907 °C). The melting point is the lowest of all the d-block metals aside from mercury and cadmium;  for this reason among others, zinc, cadmium, and mercury are often not considered to be transition metals like the rest of the d-block metals.

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