Question

What is Malleability?

Answer 1

Hint: It is a specific property held by some metals that they can be converted into thin sheets. It involves giving some physical forces to metal in order to make changes in its outside shape.

Complete step by step solution:
- Malleability is a property that makes a metal to be converted into thin sheets when being hammered, beaten or rolled out without breaking.
- So, when metal is rolled out or being hammered, at molecular level, the atoms of metal are flexible enough and slide upon each other to obtain a new shape that is being given to them. The important thing here is that the bonds between metals do not break when hammered. This is called Malleability.
- As an example Iron, Gold, Silver, Lead, Aluminum, Copper and many more metals are malleable. That’s why we can see that thin foils of gold, silver and aluminum are commercially available.
- There is a simple fact that more brittle and harder the metal, less malleable it will be because it has atoms strongly bonded to each other and when being beaten by outside force, it may break.

Additional Information:
- Malleability is very similar to another property called Ductility. Ductility is the ability of a metal to withstand stretching force applied to it and it makes metal stretchable. As an example, copper has both good malleability and good ductility as it is easily malleable by compression and can be stretched as well.
- Temperature has an effect on the malleability property of a metal.

Note: Note that even applying high compression force, the metallic bonds between metal atoms do not break in malleable metals. Instead they just get flexible to change. Do not get confused by similarities of Malleability and Ductility.