Inorganic compounds which include metals, minerals, and organometallic compounds are used as catalysts, pigments, coatings, surfactants, medicines, fuels and more. They often have high melting points and specific high or low electrical conductivity properties, which make them useful for specific purposes. The scope of the review focusses on the application of a few inorganic materials with spec...

Molybdenum (Mo), a bcc metal with a melting point of 2,610°C and a density of 10.22 g/cm, is an important refractory metal. The refractory properties of molybdenum reflect the high strength of interatomic bonding resulting from the overlap of the 4d-orbitals and the number of bonding electrons available (1). The melting point of molybdenum is exceeded only by those of tungsten and tantalum, amo...

We demonstrate that the embedded-atom method and related potentials predict many dimensionless properties of simple metals to depend predominantly on a single coefficient μ, which typically lies between 0.3 and 0.45. Among other relations presented in this work, we find that [Formula: see text], [Formula: see text], and [Formula: see text] hold within 25% accuracy and also find a linear depende...

Mixed crystals of alkali halides find applications in optical, optoelectronics and electronic devices. In the present study the pure and mixed crystals of NaClx NaBry-x KCl1-y were grown from the aqueous solution. The grown crystals were characterized by taking XRD, TG/DTA and Vicker’s hardness measurement. The Debye temperature is an important parameter of a solid. Several methods of evaluatin...

Agricultural waste ashes are used as resource materials to synthesize new glass and glass-ceramics. The as-prepared materials are characterized using various techniques for their structural and dielectric properties to check their suitability in microelectronic applications. Sugarcane leaves ash exhibits higher content of alkali metal oxides than rice husk ash, which reduces the melting point o...

We present molecular dynamics simulations of the homogeneous (mechanical) melting transition of a bcc metal, vanadium. We study both the nominally perfect crystal as well as one that includes point defects. According to the Born criterion, a solid cannot be expanded above a critical volume, at which a ’rigidity catastrophe’ occurs. This catastrophe is caused by the vanishing of the elastic shea...

A dimer of bound atoms cannot melt, only dissociate. Bulk metals show a well defined first order transition between their solid and liquid phases. The appearance of the melting transition is explored for increasing clusters sizes via the signatures in the specific heat and the root mean square of the bond lengths δB (Berry parameter) by means of Monte-Carlo simulations of Al clusters modelled b...

The physics of sliding nanofriction at high temperature near the substrate melting point, TM, is so far unexplored. We conducted simulations of hard tips sliding on a prototype non-melting surface, NaCl(100), revealing two distinct and opposite phenomena for ploughing and for grazing friction in this regime. We found a frictional drop close to TM for deep ploughing and wear, but on the contrary...