Influences of 1.0 wt.% additives on the microstructures and mechanical properties of gold

Abstract Gold is an ancient metal, it can be widely used in the electronics, dentistry and jewelry industry. It is also well known that pure gold has good ductility and very lower Vickers Hardness. These mechanical properties of pure gold definitely lead to easy deformation, scratch, abrasion and so on when pure gold is put into application. Therefore, it is necessary to strengthen pure gold by micro-alloying to avoid its obvious deficiencies and maintain its excellent properties such as yellow color, good thermal conductivity, and chemical stability. Zr, Ce and Si were chosen as the alloying elements to make “Chuk Kam”, which are no more than 1.0 wt.%, to strengthen pure gold in this work. The investigations showed that Zr, Ce and Si can strengthen pure gold significantly at as-cast gold from 30HV to 69HV, heat treatment state to 47.5HV and wrought state to 121HV. In this paper, we show how Zr, Ce and Si modify pure gold in structure, thermal characteristic, mechanical properties and what the distributions of different phases and elements are.