Tungsten: the Perfect Metal for Bullets and Missiles Part Three

Details: Category: Tungsten Information; Published on Tuesday, 02 September 2014 16:25

It is used in the spikes in the drive tracks of snowmobiles, the vibrators that wobble our mobile phones when they ring, weights for fishing tackle, the balls of ballpoint pens, and professional darts.

It is also why fraudsters have sometimes managed to make themselves an easy profit by passing off gold plated bars of tungsten as the real thing. And its density and hardness is why the military has called tungsten into service in another kind of evolutionary arms race.

"Tungsten makes very good bullets," the military analyst Robert Kelley tells me. "It is the kind of thing that if you fire it at someone else's armour, it will go right through it and kill it."

And just like the creatures of the Cambrian period, once someone starts using teeth (or tungsten bullets) you need to do something about it.

"If you introduce tungsten into your bullets you've got to introduce tungsten into your armour," says Mr Kelley.

He describes the fascinating balance military engineers have to negotiate between the strength of tungsten and the costs in fuel and manoeuvrability all that extra weight brings.

"They'll put the tungsten on the side of the tank but not on the top. So then people will develop warheads that will fly towards the tank and then at the last minute go up and then drop on it, so then you have to start arming the top of the tank.

"So it is a constant game of give and take."

And tungsten's extraordinary properties have led to the development of a class of missiles that work without explosives.

"Kinetic bombardment" weapons involve firing what are, in effect, spears of tungsten at incredible speed towards your target. They can penetrate thick steel armour and cause terrific, but very localised, devastation.

Tungsten's only rival for this kind of application is the radioactive element uranium. Depleted uranium is (almost) as dense as tungsten and has an added advantage - from a military perspective - that it burns at the extreme temperatures generated as you punch your way through steel tank armour.

That will often blow up any explosives in the tank.

"Put it this way, if you are the guy inside the tank, you will not remember what happened," says Kelley bluntly.

So why does the military still use tungsten if uranium has this macabre, but useful additional property?

Because, as the people of Kuwait discovered after first Gulf War, depleted uranium leaves a potentially deadly dust behind after it burns. It sounds bizarre but, in the world of warfare, tungsten is the eco-friendly alternative.

All these evolving military and industrial uses explain why tungsten is classified as a critical strategic element by many nations.

Yet more than 80% of world supply is controlled by China, and in recent years China has imposed restrictions on the export of tungsten - along with many other raw commodities. It wants to encourage the development of the hi-tech industries that use tungsten within China itself.

That's also helped to push prices up, making previously uneconomic non-Chinese deposits worthwhile to mine.

Hemerdon, on the edge of Dartmoor, is the first new metal mine to be opened in Britain for 40 years, and will exploit the world's third largest tungsten deposit.

It is being re-opened by a company called Wolf Minerals, named after "wolfram", an alternative name for tungsten and why the element is represented by a W in the periodic table. (In fact, "volfram" is the name used in Sweden, where "tungsten" refers to Scheelite, calcium tungstate.)

This new mine is another manifestation of the competitive pressures that shape the modern world and - as we have discovered - drove evolution in the primordial world too.

Though ironically the rocks they'll be mining at Hemerdon are much younger than the Cambrian - a mere 400 million years old.

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