Zinc ingot is a piece in a form of metal bar made of zinc or its alloys. Zinc ingots is a stock material, a semi-finished product which is used to produce other kinds of zinc-containing products. The content of pure zinc ingots varies from 98 to 100%. For example, grade Z0 contains 99.975% of pure metal, while Z0A has 99.98% of it. The color of zinc ingots is silver-white.
Zinc can be slab in its nature, produced of ore (primary) and scrap (secondary). The type is defined by the impurity content.
The main advantage of slab zinc is its extremely high corrosion resistance and ability to prevent metals from corrosion. Zinc ingot is considered to be an average solid metal. At room temperature (in cold condition) metal is rather delicate, becoming highly plastic at elevated temperature 100-150°С. This allows to easily convert it to foil or leaves. Metal melts at a relatively low temperature 419.6°С taking on a good property of flowability. It easily fills casting forms and lends itself to forging when heated. When exposed to air, zinc ingot looses its metallic luster rather quickly due to the oxides (passive cover) on the surface that protect metal against corrosive destruction.
The field of application of zinc ingots is very wide. Metal industry is its main consumer, because zinc bars are used as a raw material when producing various zinc-containing alloys. As an alloying addition to alloys and metals, specifically to alloys containing aluminum, magnesium, ferrum, nickel, argentum, aurum, cuprum, bismuth, it gives them additional useful properties such as corrosion resistance, solidness, improves their casting properties (e.g. when casting automobile parts and other components). Alloys with zinc (special brasses and others) are of high demand in weapon and engineering industries.
Zinc ingots are consumed in great amounts by the factories of hot galvanizing (including those having continuous production cycle) and galvanic productions. For this purpose pure metal is used, because the quality of zinc ingot directly influences the quality of protection coating. Producing of protection coating consumes nearly a half of the total amount of produced metal. Zinc plated steel is further used in building industry, in everyday life and many other fields.
