Metal Powder

Mercury liquid silvery-white slowly tarnishes in moist air. It is also frozen into a soft solid like tin or lead. Mercury does not wet glass or cling to it, and this property, coupled with its rapid and uniform volume expansion throughout its liquid range. These properties make it useful in various meters such as thermometers, barometers, and manometers. Mercury has also some properties such as high density and low vapor pressure.

Gold and silver dissolve readily in mercury, and in the past years, this property was utilized in the extraction of these metals from their ores. Because of the good electrical conductivity of mercury makes it extraordinarily useful in sealed electrical switches and relays. Mercury is widely applied in manufacturing advertising signs, mercury switch sans other electrical apparatus.  

An electrical discharge through mercury vapor contained in a fused silica tube or bulb produces a bluish glow rich in ultraviolet light, a phenomenon used in ultraviolet, fluorescent, and high-pressure mercury-vapor lamps. Mercury’s high thermal neutron-capture tendency.  Mercury is still applied in some electrical gear, for instance, switches, and rectifiers, which need to be reliable, and for industrial catalysis.

It has good thermal conductivity and makes it applicable as a shield. It is also utilized as a coolant in nuclear reactors. Much mercury is employed in the preparation of pharmaceuticals and agricultural and industrial fungicides. The use of mercury in the synthesis of chlorine and caustic soda (sodium hydroxide) by electrolysis of brine. It fully depends upon the fact that mercury employed as the negative pole, or cathode dissolves the sodium liberated to form a liquid amalgam.

An interesting application of the mercury vapors, it is used is the use of mercury vapor instead of steam in some electrical generating plants, the higher boiling point of mercury providing greater efficiency in the heat cycle. It is also employed in barometers, manometers because of its density and from this; it has also become a way of measuring pressure in millimeters of mercury.