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Tungsten Research Paper

Decent Essays

Justin Taylor
Mrs.Lewis
Tungsten
Title of Your Report

Tungsten, also known as wolfram, is a chemical element with symbol W and atomic number 74. The word tungsten comes from the Swedish language tung sten, which directly translates to heavy stone. Its name in Swedish is volfram, however, in order to distinguish it from scheelite, which in Swedish is alternatively named tungsten.
A hard, rare metal under standard conditions when uncombined, tungsten is found naturally on Earth only in chemical compounds. It was identified as a new element in 1781, and first isolated as a metal in 1783. Its important ores include wolframite and scheelite. The free element is remarkable for its robustness, especially the fact that it has the highest melting …show more content…

and a much lower superconducting transition temperature TC relative to the β phase: ca. 0.015 K vs. 1–4 K; mixing the two phases allows obtaining intermediate TC values. The TC value can also be raised by alloying tungsten with another metal . Such tungsten alloys are sometimes used in low-temperature superconducting circuits.
Isotopes
Naturally occurring tungsten consists of five isotopes whose half-lives are so long that they can be considered stable. Theoretically, all five can decay into isotopes of element 72 by alpha emission, but only 180W has been observed to do so with a half-life of ×1018 years; on average, this yields about two alpha decays of 180W in one gram of natural tungsten per year. The other naturally occurring isotopes have not been observed to decay, constraining their half-lives to be:

Another 30 artificial radioisotopes of tungsten have been characterized, the most stable of which are 181W with a half-life of 121.2 days, 185W with a half-life of 75.1 days, 188W with a half-life of 69.4 days, 178W with a half-life of 21.6 days, and 187W with a half-life of 23.72 h. Tungsten typically combines with oxygen to form the yellow tungstic oxide, WO3, which dissolves in aqueous alkaline solutions to form tungstate ions,

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