Tungsten alloy gains a great deal of popularity in fishing sinkers thanks to its non-toxicity. Tungsten is a rare element of very hard and dense metal. Lead has the density of 1.7 times of water, while tungsten 19.3 times of water. It is mined in only a few areas around the world, China is the biggest producer of tungsten. 

In the last article, we talked about the brief history of darts and the fact that tungsten alloy got more and more popular in darts. Now let’s have a deeper understanding of the application of tungsten alloy in darts.

1.0 The Importance of Dart Weight

The introduction of tungsten darts revolutionized the game, and this is not an exaggeration. Tungsten darts allowed two mutually interrelated things to happen. As darts became smaller, they also became heavier, and heavier darts radically improved player’s scores! A tungsten dart, being heavier than a brass or plastic dart, will fly through the air in a straighter line and with more force; which means bounce outs are less likely to happen. Therefore, heavier darts provided players with more control during the throw and made tighter grouping more likely. Anyone that knows about the intricacies of darts scoring systems will tell you about the importance of being able to place darts in tight groups consistently. Being able to place darts in tight groups consistently will make you an overall more balanced player of the game. Not being able to hit 180s all the time is not so bad when you can knock down a checkout on demand and hit doubles all the time.

2.0 The Perfect Metal for A Dart Tungsten Percentages and Composition

Tungsten darts are not a one size fit all affair, there are quite a few options when it comes to choosing to purchase a tungsten dart. Because of the chemical properties of the metal and various practical reasons during manufacture, darts made of tungsten are not 100% pure. Heavy metal alloys made of tungsten and nickel are used: with nickel-iron and nickel-copper matrices being the most common. These heavy metal alloys allow for enhanced machinability and permit manufacturers of darts to offer products with higher rigidity, lower vibration, higher damping, and reduce thermal expansion properties.

The most common compositions available on the market are:

• 65% Tungsten – 35% Nickel

• 80% Tungsten – 20% Nickel

• 90% Tungsten – 10% Nickel

• 95% Tungsten – 05% Nickel

• 97% Tungsten – 03% Nickel

3.0 The Perfect Metal for A Dart

One of the most defining characteristics of tungsten metal and its alloys is its density. Tungsten density is almost twice that of lead and is comparable to that of uranium. For those of you who do not remember your high school science lessons, density is a function of mass and volume, which means that a substance with a high-density value can have a smaller size while maintaining the same mass. In laymen’s terms, if you have two objects of equal weight but with different densities, the denser object will also be the smaller. A 30-gram dart made of tungsten will be approximately half the diameter of a 30-gram dart made out of brass!

Some people will say that tungsten darts should not be recommended to beginners and that only advanced players and professionals benefit from the added control; however, anyone who is serious about getting better at the game should invest in tungsten darts from the get-go.

Even though tungsten darts are more costly to make and therefore a more expensive purchase, the benefits that this most important of metals provides cannot be easily dismissed.

A dart’s point, barrel, shaft, and flight can all be made out of various materials, each with different advantages and disadvantages. There are over 90 metals in the periodic table and perhaps hundreds of metal alloys known to man, yet most darts are made of tungsten. Why are darts made of tungsten alloy?

Tungsten alloy armor piercing shell is a type of ammunition designed to penetrate armor. From the 1860s to 1950s, a major application of armor-piercing tungsten projectiles were to defeat the thick armor carried on many warships. From the 1920s onwards, armor-piercing weapons were required for anti-tank missions.

The fuel cell is a proton exchange membrane fuel cell. It directly uses methanol aqueous solution or hydrogen as a fuel supply source to generate electricity. It has the characteristics of quick start at low temperature, environmental friendliness, and simple battery structure. It is an efficient green energy source.

Cadmium selenide nanocrystal is the most widely studied and most promising II-VI semiconductor nanocrystals. Due to its important nonlinear optical properties, luminescent properties and other physicochemical properties, it is considered as a material with great and widely application in the future.

Probably the most well-known outlet for tungsten alloys is the aerospace industry, where weights and counterweights are often required to be housed in restricted areas. With significant reductions in size possible, this in turn, leads to greater control of weight distribution. 

In some situation, we need some special things to add weight in sailboat. But the space for the special things usually very small. For example, the sailboats, if the sailboats weight is not enough, it can turn turtle easily, especially when moving in a wind weather. So, we need add some tungsten alloy counterweights into the sailboats to against the yawing when sailing forward.

Cesium tungsten bronze (Cs0.33 WO3) nano powder is a new functional materials, which has strong absorption and high transmittance ability in near infrared region (800-1200nm wavelength) and the visible region (380-780nm wavelength). It can be used as infrared transparent barrier.

Biomass is a renewable resource with abundant reserves, wide distribution, low price and carbon fixation function. It has the potential to replace fossil resources to produce hydrocarbon fuels and chemical products. In recent years, studies have found that biomass such as lignocellulose is mainly composed of cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin. After pretreatment, carbohydrate raw materials such as cellulose and glucose can be obtained, which can be used to produce high value-added chemicals and organisms’ oil.