Papers - Miscellaneous - The Role of the Platinum Metals in Dental Alloys, III The Influence of Platinum and Palladium and Heat Treatment upon the Microstructure and Constitution of Basic Alloys (With Discussion)

In a previous communication1 the improvement in slrength, harden-ability and color, occasioned by replacing gold in a typical gold-silver-copper alloy by various amounts of platinum, or palladium, was discussed. In the present paper the results of further studies upon the constitution and the nature of the hardening transformation in these alloys are presented. This research may be summarized as follows: 1. The liquidus and solidus have been determined for the alloys of the palladium and platinum series. Cooling curves were utilized for determining the liquidus of the palladium alloys but this method proved unsuitable for the platinum alloys so that a novel quenching method was utilized for the latter. Both the liquidus and solidus of the palladium alloys increase steadily with the palladium content. The liquidus of the platinum alloys increases rapidly with the platinum content, while the solidus temperature increases with the platinum content up to about 14 atomic per cent platinum, but suffers no further increase with additional increments of platinum up to 20 atomic per cent at least, owing to a peritectic reaction. 2. Palladium, and even more effectively platinum, reduces the rate of grain growth. Owing to this fact and to the increase in the solidus temperature, "overheating" does little or no damage to alloys containing reasonable quantities of these elements. This is confirmed both by tensile tests and metallographic examination. 3. The excess phase present in one of the high-platinum-content alloys has been isolated and chemically analyzed and was found to consist almost wholly of platinum, gold, and copper, evidently derived from the compound AuCu, by the partial replacement of gold by platinum. 4. The variation in the solubility of this platinum-content phase in the alpha solid solution with the temperature has been determined. This