As a typical tungsten product, tungsten wire is a fine filament made by forging and drawing tungsten rods, known in English as tungsten wire, with a tungsten content generally exceeding 99.95%. However, due to the high hardness and brittleness of metallic tungsten, which makes processing difficult, small amounts of potassium oxide, silicon oxide, and aluminum oxide are often added during production. The resulting modified tungsten wire is commonly referred to as doped tungsten wire, 218 tungsten wire, or non-sagging tungsten wire, offering superior overall performance compared to pure tungsten wire.

Based on differences in chemical composition and structural components, common hard alloys can be categorized into steel-bonded hard alloys, tungsten-cobalt alloys, tungsten-titanium-tantalum-cobalt alloys, and Tungsten-Titanium-cobalt alloys, with their physicochemical properties and applications being largely similar.

As a typical representative of rare earth tungsten electrodes, the cerium-tungsten electrode is an electrode product with an appropriate amount of cerium oxide added to a tungsten base. It is a non-radioactive, refractory, or non-consumable metal electrode material, serving as the preferred substitute for thorium-tungsten electrodes. Known in English as the cerium tungsten electrode, it features a gray color-coded tip. The cerium oxide content is generally 2%, with electrode diameters ranging from 0.5 mm to 12.0 mm and lengths of 150 mm or 175 mm.

Composite tungsten electrode materials can be categorized into thorium-tungsten electrodes, cerium-tungsten electrodes, yttrium-tungsten electrodes, zirconium-tungsten electrodes, and lanthanum-tungsten electrodes, depending on the additives used. Although all these tungsten electrodes are primarily made from the refractory metal tungsten, their physical and chemical properties and applications vary slightly due to differences in modifiers.