Will Russia-Ukraine War Make Yttrium Tungsten Electrode (WY20) Price Increase?

Yttrium is a lanthanide metal found in most rare earth minerals, especially yttrium tantalite. It can be used as the yttrium phosphor to produce the red color on television screens and monitors and used as a superconductor and as a component of X-ray filters and superalloys. When added to tungsten as a rare earth element, it can be used as a welding electrode.

Among the non-consumable electrodes, the yttrium tungsten electrode is the most consistent, so it is often used to weld steel structures and non-ferrous alloys such as carbon steel, low alloy steel, copper, titanium, stainless steel, etc. under direct current/DC. This type of electrode arc beam is slender and has a large degree of compression, and its penetration is the largest in medium and large currents. Thanks to these characteristics, it is especially popular in the military industry and aerospace industry.

Yttrium tungsten welding electrode contains 1.8-2.2% yttrium oxide, and the electron escape work is 2.8-3.2ev. They are marked WY-20 (navy blue) according to international marking. Among the components of the WY20 electrode, there are silicon, molybdenum, manganese, sulfur, carbon, and phosphorus. When the impact hardness is 100 J/cm2, the surfacing coefficient is 9.5 h/Ah. One of the characteristics of domestic electrodes is the need for short arc processing and pre-baking. The last is done in a dedicated furnace for an hour.

For tungsten electrodes, what is the impact of the Russia-Ukraine war?

As the world's second largest tungsten resource reserve country and the third largest tungsten producer, Russia's supply of tungsten resources to foreign countries (especially to European countries) will be affected by measures such as war and economic sanctions, which will stimulate international tungsten price to rise, and corresponding products prices will also increase.

Furthermore, shipping may not only be caused by wars and regional conflicts, maritime control and inspection and other factors, roadway blockages, cargo ships and cargo flights being affected by airspace control, no-fly zones, and increased war risks. The risk of delayed delivery, or even non-delivery, at the same time, even if some shipping routes can be lined up, the goods may face the risk of loss, damage and no one to take responsibility for the goods on the way.

Considering current market conditions, if you have got the purchasing plans for tungsten electrodes, it is better to place the order as soon as possible. 

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Tungsten Filaments and Crucibles for Microprobe and Electron Beam Systems

Electron microscopes generate images by bombarding samples with electrons and then converting the results of this interaction into visual images. In order to form an image, the generated electrons need to be tightly controlled.

Electron beams come from filaments made of various materials. The most common is the tungsten hairpin gun, which is widely used in scanning electron microscopes, transmission electron microscopes, and microprobe systems. This filament is a tungsten ring that acts as a cathode. Apply voltage to the loop to heat it up. The anode, which is positive relative to the filament, forms a strong attraction to electrons. This causes electrons to be accelerated towards the anode. Some accelerate near the anode and down the column to the sample.

Tungsten wire, also known as cathode or electron emitter or electron source, is mainly made of high-quality tungsten. Of all pure metals, tungsten has the highest melting point (3422°C), the lowest vapor pressure at temperatures above 1650°C, and the highest tensile strength. Tungsten also has the lowest coefficient of thermal expansion of all pure metals. This combination of properties makes tungsten an ideal material.

Since the electrons emitted in the various types of guns are heated, their energy distribution is not a spike. Instead, they have a Boltzmann distribution that can vary widely depending on the type of filament. For a good microscope, you want ΔE/E to be as small as possible. Therefore, the filament type needs to be selected according to its own applicable needs.

Chinatungsten Online/CTIA GROUP is a professional tungsten manufacturer. The high-quality filaments we offer are manufactured to OEM specifications using special tools to guarantee the correct shape of the filament and produce the best possible electron beam. We can provide tungsten filaments and crucibles for electron beam systems. 

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3D Printing Tungsten for Medical Radiation Shielding and Nuclear Imaging

Metal additive manufacturing is gaining popularity. Aluminum, bronze, chromium, stainless steel, iron and copper are just a few examples of the most commonly used metals. Some of these—often in the form of alloys—are already available for the additive manufacturing industry, and these elements are typically processed by laser powder bed melting or electron beam melting.

One special metal that shows great potential in the field of additive manufacturing, especially 3D printing for the automotive and aerospace industries, is tungsten because of its outstanding mechanical strength, high stiffness and high thermal load capacity.

Tungsten has the highest melting point of any metal at about 6,152°F (3,400°C), making it ideal for energy and lighting technology, but also difficult to manufacture. In its current state, the biggest challenge with using tungsten in additive manufacturing is that printed parts are often prone to cracking, which greatly affects quality. This problem is especially prevalent in more complex, precise shapes with curves or holes that cannot be modeled using traditional crafting or machining techniques. But now there is a solution: 3D printing.

3D printing is the process of making three-dimensional solid objects from digital files, the creation of which is achieved through additive processes. In an additive process, objects are created by placing successive layers of material until the object is created. Each of these layers can be viewed as a thin sliced cross-section of the object. 3D printing enables you to produce complex shapes using less material than traditional manufacturing methods.

Depending on process conditions, tungsten has bulk and optically determined densities between 94% and 98%, but parts can experience microcracks and defects due to residual stresses on the micro and macro scales. Even so, the density and quality of the samples produced during the 3D printing process are high enough for applications such as medical radiation shielding and nuclear imaging, as well as other plasma-oriented environments. And the parameters of laser powder bed fusion can be tailored to produce relatively dense tungsten parts.

3D printing tungsten allows new applications for the material as it can produce parts with high precision and complexity. Other researchers have studied tungsten 3D printing before, and 3D printed tungsten components have even been commercialized. Despite the challenges, tungsten has proven itself to be a valuable 3D printing material. 

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3D Printed Collimators for Physical Optics Enables Lower Costs

A collimator, a device used to transform the diverging light or other radiation from a point light source into a parallel beam. Special measurements in spectroscopy and in geometric and physical optics require this kind of collimation.

The optical collimator consists of a tube. One end of the tube is a convex lens, and the other end is an adjustable aperture. The aperture is located in the focal plane of the lens. The radiation entering the aperture leaves the collimator as a parallel beam, so the image can be viewed without parallax.

The collimator may be a telescope with an aperture at the main focal length of the lens. The light from the light source is focused on the slit through another lens with a similar focal length, and the slit serves as the light-emitting object of the optical system.

In radiology, a collimator is a set of absorbers used to limit X-rays, gamma rays, or nuclear particle beams to the size and angular spread required for a particular application.

The typical manufacturing technology for this product is powder metallurgy + machining process. This process can take months and cost is very high. For complex parts, it is difficult to be processed with traditional method. Now that they can be 3D printed, the same collimators can be manufactured in 5 to 15 days with low costs. 

Moreover, this process can allow for much finer detail in collimator designs, meaning that researchers have the capability to reduce leaks and shape a collimator in unique ways.

The 3D printed collimators could lead to a change in the way collimators are used. Currently, a single collimator is used for a single neutron scattering instrument. Now that collimators can be created quickly and inexpensively, they can be changed and used in different experiments, similar to the use of different sample environments for different experiments.

Chinatungsten Online is a professional manufacturer of tungsten and molybdenum. Kindly feel free to contact us if you have got the purchasing plan for 3D printed collimators. 

If you have any inquiry of tungsten collimators, please feel free to contact us:

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Pure Tungsten Pins Is Used for Probes and Cathode Emission

Tungsten pins, also named tungsten needles or tungsten electrodes, are a typical tungsten product with purity of 99.95%. It has a silver-white appearance, a slender structure, a length of 20mm-1000mm, and a diameter of 0.3mm-10mm. Usually, the product is customized. 

The pin is mostly made from pure tungsten and sometimes tungsten alloy, with the characteristics of high hardness, greater tensile strength, good wear resistance, excellent ductility, and excellent electrical conductivity. However, if a fine tip is required, it is very easy to bend or break during transportation or using. 

These pins can be divided into different kinds of products, such as rod shape or a rod with a sharp tip. Although their characteristics are the same, their applications show slight difference. 

The rod-shaped electrode is a slender cylindrical pure tungsten or tungsten alloy, which is mainly used as an electrode for argon arc welding. During welding, an arc is generated between the tungsten electrode and the workpiece, and under the action of the arc heat, the filler metal will melt with the workpiece to form a weld. 

The pointed needle can be simply understood as pure tungsten or tungsten alloy with a sharp end at one or both ends, and is mainly used as an instrument probe, such as a digital four-probe tester. The distance between the four needles in the digital four-probe tester cannot be too long or too short, and each has different functions.

In addition to being used as argon arc welding electrodes and instrument probes, tungsten pins can also be used for cathode emission and for engraving metal surfaces, cutting particles in rubber wool, handling single particles, and blowing crystal embryos and glass.

At Chinatungsten Online, we pride ourselves in offering our customers sophisticated pins/needles machining and fabrication capabilities. We’ve honed our processes during our decades of successfully working with molybdenum and tungsten, and are dedicated to supporting your precision machining and fabrication requirements.

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What Is the Best Material for X-ray Collimation – Tungsten Metal or Tungsten Alloy?

A collimator is a device used to transform the divergent light or other radiation from a point light source into a parallel beam, and also is an absorber device used to limit X-rays, gamma rays, or nuclear particle beams to the size and angular spread required for a specific application. Normally, special measurements in spectroscopy and geometric and physical optics require this kind of light collimation.

For reasons of patient dose and image quality, X-ray collimation for radiography and fluoroscopy projection imaging is important. Actively collimating the volume of interest will reduce the overall integrated dose to the patient, thereby minimizing the risk of radiation. Less radiation will result in less X-ray scattering incident on the detector. This leads to improved object contrast and image quality.

In a linear accelerator (linac), the main collimator may be made of depleted uranium because the density of this material is approximately 1.6 times that of lead. The secondary electric collimator can better define the beam shape and is made of lead or tungsten. The multi-leaf collimator (MLC), which is now widely used in medical linear accelerators, consists of two thin tungsten "leaf" collimator groups, each group consisting of 40 to 80 leaves composition. 

As depleted uranium and lead materials are not easy to completely eliminated by the body after entering the human body, and will damage the internal organs, tungsten metal is the most popular materials for this device now. Generally spreading, the higher density of the material, the better radiation protection. Why tungsten alloy collimator is more popular compared with pure tungsten collimator? 

The density of tungsten metal is high, however, it is also easy to fragile during machining if you use powder metallurgy to produce, especially for complex collimator. Therefore, tungsten alloy, added with the element of nickel, copper or iron, help improve the problem. The alloy has high density, better processability and good anti-radiation, and thus most collimators are made of this material. 

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3D Printing Pure Tungsten Parts in the Medical Industry

Tungsten, also known as Wolfram, is a rare metal known for its highest melting point of all elements. In addition to excellent temperature resistance, the material also has strong abrasion resistance and chemical resistance. These good properties make it an ideal material for components that operate at extreme temperatures.

Pure tungsten does not have the hardness of composite materials, but its excellent heat resistance and radiation shielding properties are very useful in the nuclear and medical industries. The medical industry generally uses pure tungsten for MRI scans, collimators, and radiation shielding. But there is a problem: it is very brittle at room temperature, which means it is difficult to process using traditional techniques.

For simple collimators, radiation shielding and other products, powder metallurgy technology can be used to process, but for high precision and complex parts, using traditional technology is suffering. Therefore, the emergence of 3D printing has solved this thorny problem.

The principle of 3D printing is to use electrons accelerated in a vacuum to melt metal powder. By moving the electron beam, 3D components can be produced from metal by means of addition. This technology was originally developed for titanium alloys and materials that require high processing temperatures.

The tungsten metal powder is preheated before it is melted. This preheating procedure reduces the deformation and internal stress of the metal, making it possible to process materials that are easily broken at room temperature but deform when heated. The printed product basically does not need to be processed again, unless there are special requirements for precision or other requirements.

Tungsten provides characteristics rarely seen in 3D printing materials. It is non-magnetic, good at absorbing and shielding radiation, so that 3D printing pure tungsten parts can be widely used in the nuclear energy industry and medical industry. 3D printed tungsten collimator is one of them. Chinatungsten Online is a professional manufacturer of tungsten and molybdenum, which can provide 3D tungsten products.

If you have any inquiry of 3D printing pure tungsten parts, please feel free to contact us:
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