Metallurgy of Pure Metals

The metallurgy of pure metals is a subject of university courses concerned with the methods of refining in preparation of high purity substances. Special attention is paid not only to the high degree of chemical purity attainable by chemical or physico-chemical hydrometallurgical methods, such as sorption, extraction, crystallisation from aqueous solutions, electrolysis, and also by pyrometallurgical methods such as crystallisation from melts, evaporation, condensation and transport reactions, electro-transport, diffusion separation of substances, removal of gases from melts and vacuum refining of metals.
In the production of high purity metals by crystallisation refining methods, zone melting and directional crystallisation as the main methods of preparation of defined super purity metals, the controlled redistribution of the impurities and admixtures present in the main substance also takes place at the melt-crystal interface in the single crystal state. The determination of the distribution coefficient, its properties and correlation with the proton number of the admixture of the distribution coefficient is the subject of special attention in this book. The Appendix summarizes the values of the distribution coefficients in binary diagrams, mainly copper, aluminium, iron and its transformation, selected noble, refractory and radioactive metals and lanthanides and semiconductors.