The authoritative public forum
  for Metal Finishing since 1989
-----

What are the uses of silumin?

hi my name is jess and I am a 14 year old year 9 student in Australia and I am currently studying chemistry
I was hoping that you could help me with some questions on my assignment as I have looked everywhere, but still no success.
the question is what are the uses of silumin?
please help me! I really need it!

from jess xx

Jessica p
student - toodyay, WA, Australia
2007

---

Although we could list a few such things for you, Jessica, I'm sure the purpose of the assignment is for you to go through the exercise of finding out what silumin's properties are and then finding some things that are made from it in order to understand that materials are chosen because they offer advantages over other materials that have different properties.

Please describe your understanding of silumin's properties and why you think they might be advantageous, and I will be very happy to name some things that are made of silumin. You have a famous public library in Toodyay. Have you considered asking the librarian for help in locating a book with info about silumin? Good luck.

Ted Mooney, P.E.
Striving to live Aloha
finishing.com - Pine Beach, New Jersey
2007

---

Could not have looked too far as a google search gave 2,830 hits.
It is what I thought that it must be, but did not know for sure.

James Watts
- Navarre, Florida
2007

---

2007

Silumin is an alloy of Aluminium with a proportion of silicon added to the mix. This gives it a high fluidity when molten, as well as increased resistance to corrosion.
It also has a lower tendency to form blow-holes (bubbles)

(As to why that might be I leave it to you to try and find out.) It also has good tensile strength, (again look it up, and compare it to other alloys.)

This makes it suitable for making precision castings. Some uses have been in 35 mm camera bodies (From good manufacturers like Nikon and Pentax) where casting makes it a lot cheaper than machining out of a solid block, but it still needs to be quite strong,precisely made, and because they are likely to be used in all sorts of places where they might be exposed to salt water for example, need to be quite good at resisting corrosion.

For your assignment you will need to find some articles which tell you this sort of thing from an authoritative source if you are going to get the best marks. Once you have located these you can add these to the a 'references' section after the main article with markers to show in the report which of the referred to sources you got the information from.

That way you show that you have actually done the work, and can back up what you say by pointing to the reference and saying, that's what these people say and they should know!

That's the way professional scientists back-up much of what they put in their papers, as they are almost always using other peoples findings as part of what they are doing.

That's the way science works, by looking at what we already know (or think we know), and finding out a little more about it. Sometimes we find that what we thought we knew was wrong in some way, usually not by much, but sometimes by quite a lot. That doesn't mean that the previous work was wrong, it just means that it was the best explanation we had before we knew a little more.

Try looking for websites of people who manufacture alloys and metallurgy articles. You might even find that some manufacturers of the sort of things made with this allow will say so as part of their sales pitch. This might not be a good reference source as salesmen tend to exaggerate the benefits of anything they mention in a pitch, but it will help you show some of the uses, if not exactly why!

Gordon Stalker
PCB design - Brighton, Sussex, UK