Nickel is generally used in steel as alloying element to obtain high corrosion resistamt alloys. Also Nickel is used as prime metarial in engineering, with other alloying elements. In this article, we will explain the properties and production process of Nickel and Nickel alloys.
Nickel is also very important engineering material that is used in many applications itself. Nickel has same characteristics in terms of strength and hardness with steel. But very good corrosion resistancy is very superior over steel. Also Nickel can be used in high temperature applications which means Nickel preserves its mechanical and material properties at high temperatures. Because of these characteristics, Nickel find very common application areas in engineering and industry.
Like many non-ferrous metals, Nickel has also its own ores in nature. The most common ore of Nickel is ‘pentlandite((Ni,Fe)9S8)’. And there must be some processes needed to be applied to that Nickel ore to extract pure or neraly pure Nickel from it. In ore, Nickel sulfides are mixed with other minerals and elements, thus flotation technique is used to eliminate these minerals and elements from ore. The sulfur in Nickel sulfide is then burned to eliminate the some portion of sulphur. And smelting process is applied to eliminate iron and silicon. As you remember from steel production, type of Bessemer style converter is used to obtain high concentration Nickel sulfur. At the end of the production of commercial high purity Nickel, electrolysis is applied to that high concentrated Nickel sulfur to obtain pure Nickel.
As we stated above, Nickel alloys are renowned with their high corrosion resistancy and high temperature application capabilities. Also lots of superalloys are based on element of Nickel.
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