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Osmium is a hard but brittle metal that remains lustrous even at high temperatures. It has a very low compressibility. Correspondingly, its bulk modulus is extremely high, reported between 395 and 462 GPa, which rivals that of diamond (443 GPa). The hardness of osmium is moderately high at 4 GPa.
Osmium is a hard, brittle, blue-gray metal, and the densest stable element—about twice as dense as lead. The density of osmium is slightly greater than that of iridium ; the two are so similar (22.587 versus 22.562 g/cm 3 at 20 °C) that each was at one time considered to be the densest element.
The chemical elements can be broadly divided into metals, metalloids, and nonmetals according to their shared physical and chemical properties.All elemental metals have a shiny appearance (at least when freshly polished); are good conductors of heat and electricity; form alloys with other metallic elements; and have at least one basic oxide.
The common oxide of carbon (CO 2) is a medium-strength acidic oxide. Silicon has a blue-grey metallic lustre. Silicon is a metallic-looking relatively unreactive solid with a density of 2.3290 g/cm 3, and is hard (MH 6.5) and brittle. It melts at 1414 °C (cf. steel ~1370 °C) and boils at 3265 °C. Silicon has a diamond cubic structure (CN 4).
Embrittlement is used to describe any phenomena where the environment compromises a stressed material's mechanical performance, such as temperature or environmental composition. This is oftentimes undesirable as brittle fracture occurs quicker and can much more easily propagate than ductile fracture, leading to complete failure of the equipment.
Most definitions of the term 'refractory metals' list the extraordinarily high melting point as a key requirement for inclusion. By one definition, a melting point above 4,000 °F (2,200 °C) is necessary to qualify, which includes iridium, osmium, niobium, molybdenum, tantalum, tungsten, rhenium, rhodium, ruthenium and hafnium. [2]
Osmium diboride (OsB 2) has a high bulk modulus of 395 GPa and therefore is considered as a candidate superhard material, but the maximum achieved Vickers hardness is 37 GPa, slightly below the 40 GPa limit of superhardness. A common way to synthesize OsB 2 is by a solid-state metathesis reaction containing a 2:3 mixture of OsCl 3:MgB 2. [10]
Tellurium is a soft (MH 2.25) and brittle semi-metallic element. It is commonly regarded as a metalloid, or by some authors either as a metal or a non-metal. Tellurium has a polyatomic (CN 2) hexagonal crystalline structure. It is a semiconductor with a band gap of 0.32 to 0.38 eV.