Materials for Design

Magnesium Alloys (Mg)

From our earliest primitive tools to the first attempts to fly we have searched to find lightweight, strong materials. Combine this with the increase in the number of people living in cities, commuting, transportation, increasingly nomadic lifestyles and a generation of products that more than ever require investment in reducing weight, and we have a situation where weight, or the lack of it, has a value. As the lightest commonly used metal – it is a quarter of the weight of steel and two thirds of that of aluminium – magnesium alloys clearly have a role to play in modern life.

First produced by British chemist Sir Humphry Davy in 1808, magnesium is an element with some extreme properties. It is very light, but it is also ...