Silver alloy performance improvement

Silver is extremely soft and easy to process. In order to improve its strength and hardness and increase its wear resistance, people have long added copper to silver to make silver-copper alloys, which are used in jewelry, tableware and silver coins. In order to improve the performance of silver-copper alloys, nickel, beryllium, vanadium, lithium and other third components are often added to make ternary alloys. In addition, there are many other elements added to silver can also play a strengthening role. The effect of alloying elements on the Brinell hardness of silver is shown in Figure 1. Cadmium is also a commonly used strengthening element.

Although silver is inert in an organic atmosphere, it is easily corroded and sulfurized by a sulfur-containing atmosphere. Improving silver’s resistance to sulfidation is also through alloying, such as adding gold and palladium to reduce the rate of silver sulfide film formation. In addition, many base metal elements such as manganese, antimony, tin, germanium, arsenic, gallium, indium, aluminum, zinc, nickel, and vanadium can also be added to silver to improve its sulfur resistance. There are many types of silver-based electrical contact materials, in the alloyed state, and they can also be made into fake alloys by powder metallurgy. Their purpose is to strengthen, wear and improve electrical contact performance. For different purposes, often add multiple components. In alloy-type low-power sliding contact materials, manganese, iridium, bismuth, aluminum, lead or thallium are often added to increase wear resistance. Silver-based alloy brazing filler metal is the type of brazing filler metal with the most brands, the most widely used, and the largest amount of precious metal brazing filler metals. The main requirements for brazing alloys are welding temperature, melting point, wettability and welding strength. Silver alloys as brazing filler metals are often added with copper, zinc, cadmium, manganese, tin, indium and other alloying elements to improve welding performance