Basic uses: About 50% of tungsten ore mined in the world is used for smelting high-quality steel, about 35% for producing hard steel, about 10% for tungsten wire and about 5% for other uses. Tungsten can manufacture guns, rocket propeller nozzles, armour piercing projectiles, metal cutting blades, drills, superhard dies, wire drawing dies and so on. Tungsten is widely used in mines, metallurgy, machinery, construction, transportation, electronics, chemical industry, light industry, textile, military industry, aerospace, science and technology, and various industrial fields.
Tungsten is widely used in modern technology in the pure metal state and in the alloy system state. The main alloys in the alloy system state are alloy steel, tungsten carbide-based cemented carbide, wear-resistant alloy and heat-resistant alloy. Tungsten is mainly used in the following industrial fields:
Iron and Steel Industry: Tungsten is mostly used to produce special steel. Widely used high speed steels contain 9% - 24% tungsten, 3.8% - 4.6% chromium, 1% - 5% vanadium, 4% - 7% cobalt, 0.7% - 1.5% carbon. The characteristic of high speed steel is that it can quench automatically at high tempering temperature (700 - 800 C) in air. Therefore, it still maintains high hardness and wear resistance until 600 - 650 C. Tungsten steel in alloy tool steel contains 0.8% - 1.2% tungsten; chromium tungsten silicon steel contains 2% - 2.7% tungsten; chromium tungsten steel contains 2% - 9% tungsten; chromium tungsten manganese steel contains 0.5% - 1.6% tungsten. Tungsten-containing steel is used to manufacture various tools, such as drills, milling cutters, wire drawing dies, cathode and positive dies, air support tools and other parts. Tungsten magnet steel is a permanent magnet steel with 5.2% - 6.2% tungsten, 0.68% - 0.78% carbon and 0.3% - 0.5% chromium. Tungsten-cobalt magnets contain 11.5% - 14.5% tungsten, 5.5% - 6.5% molybdenum, 11.5% - 12.5% cobalt hard magnetic materials. They have high magnetization and coercivity.