Brass has excellent plasticity and high strength, good machinability, is easy to weld, and is highly resistant to general corrosion, but is prone to stress corrosion cracking. Brass strip is an alloy of copper and zinc, named for its yellow color.
Brass strip offers good mechanical properties and wear resistance, making it suitable for manufacturing precision instruments and ship components. Brass produces a pleasant sound when struck, so instruments such as gongs, cymbals, bells, and horns are made from brass. Based on chemical composition, brass is divided into two types: ordinary brass and special brass.
(1) Ordinary brass is a binary alloy of copper and zinc. Due to its good plasticity, it is suitable for making plates, rods, wires, tubes, and deep-drawn parts such as condenser tubes, radiator tubes, and mechanical and electrical components. Brass with average copper contents of 62% and 59% can also be cast, known as cast brass.
(2) Special brass is formed by adding elements such as aluminum, silicon, manganese, lead, and tin to copper-zinc alloys to achieve higher strength, corrosion resistance, and good casting properties. Examples include lead brass, tin brass, aluminum brass, silicon brass, and manganese brass.
If the alloy consists of more than two elements, it is called special brass. For instance, copper alloys composed of lead, tin, manganese, nickel, iron, and silicon. Brass has strong wear resistance. Special brass, also known as特種黃銅, offers high strength, great hardness, strong chemical corrosion resistance, and outstanding machinability. The seamless copper tubes drawn from brass are soft and highly wear-resistant. Brass seamless tubes can be used in heat exchangers, condensers, low-temperature pipelines, and subsea transport pipes. They are also used to manufacture plates, strips, rods, tubes, and cast parts. With a copper content of 62% to 68%, brass exhibits strong plasticity and is used in manufacturing pressure-resistant equipment.