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Metallurgy. We hear this term quite often and as we all know, metallurgy go hand in hand with the metal industry; it is an integral part of the latter.

So what is metallurgy after all? Well, to put it in simple words, metallurgy can be defined as the study of the physical and chemical behavior of metals, alloys, metallic elements and intermetallic compounds. It is a domain of materials science.

Also known as “the technology of metals”, metallurgy deals with the way in which science is applied in the metals department for their practical use. Metallurgy is not only associated with the metal industry but also associated with the industries that deal with the craft of metalworking.

Metallurgy is not concerned with only one activity; it consists of al lot of practices and processes, one such being extractive metallurgy. This means the practice of removing valuable metals from the ore and then refining it into a more usable and purer form. This can be done electrolytically, chemically or even physically! Since the metal industry is concerned with only the extracted metals and not the ore as a whole, extractive metallurgy is an integrated and indispensable part of the metal industry.

Apart from extracting, metallurgy is also concerned with the production process. It deals with the production of components, obviously metals, to be used for manufacturing engineering products or consumer products. This is a complex procedure which involves the production of alloys in the first stage, followed by the shaping of such extracted metals. The shaping procedure is done by means of the heat treatment as well as surface treatment of the product. Metallurgists (people who practice metallurgy) have a hard task of achieving the balance between the material properties (strength, hardness, rigidity, corrosion, cost, weight, etc) and even ensuring that these metals do not fail to perform in temperature extremes.

Metalworking processes are a part of metallurgy. In this process, the metals are shaped into the desired shapes by various processes such as casting, molding, forging, sintering, machining, fabrication, flow forming or rolling of the metals. The idea is to alter the shape of the original material into the desired shape. Needless to say, a lot of beating, hammering, cutting with guillotines, passing the metals through narrow rollers, etc is involved.

While we all know that when metals are heated, the properties of such metals are altered and it is most vulnerable and can be manipulated, but did you know that there are plenty of cold working processes as well? It means to alter the shape of the metals when it is cold. When carried out properly, the strength of the metal can be increased further by a process called work hardening, which creates very minute, microscopic defects on the surface of the metal, which makes it resistant to further changes of its shape.