Detailed Product Description:

A finely ground silver/gray powder.  Iron is highly reactive

chemically—a strong reducing agent.  Oxidizes readily in moist

air.  Reacts with steam to yield hydrogen and iron oxides.

Dissolves in no-oxidizing acids (sulfuric and hydrochloric

acids) and in cold dilute nitric acid.

Grade/Purity:

This is Reagent Grade material with a minimum purity of 99.5%.

Applications:

Iron powder is typically used in powder metallurgy or for class-

room demonstrations of magnetism.

Background:

Iron is a lustrous, silvery soft metal.  It is one of the few ferromagnetic

elements.  Iron, along with nickel, are the most abundant metals in

metallic meteorites and in the dense-metal cores of planets such as Earth.

Iron and iron alloys are also the most common source of ferromagnetic

materials in everyday use.

Allotropes:

Iron represents perhaps the best-known example of allotropy in a metal.

There are four allotropic forms of iron, known as alpha, beta, gamma,

and delta.

As molten iron cools down it crystallizes at 1535°C into its delta allotrope,

which has a body-centered-cubic (BCC) crystal structure.  As it cools

further its crystal structure changes to face-centered-cubic (FCC) at

1401°C, where it is referred to as gamma-iron, or austenite.  At 912°C

the crystal structure again becomes BCC as beta-iron is formed, and

at 770°C (the Curie point, Tc) the iron becomes magnetic as alpha-iron,

also known as ferrite, which is also BCC.

Alpha iron, also known as ferrite, is the most stable form of iron at

normal temperatures.  It is a fairly soft metal that can dissolve only a

small concentration of carbon (no more than 0.021% by mass at 910 °C).

Above 912°C and up to 1401°C alpha iron undergoes a phase transition

from body-centered-cubic to the face-centered-cubic configuration of

gamma iron, also called austenite.  This is similarly soft and metallic

but can dissolve considerably more carbon (as much as 2.04% by

mass at 1146°C).  This form of iron is used in the 300 series (Austenitic)

stainless steels, often used for making flat ware, and hospital and food-service

equipment.

Precautions:

Download, read, and understand the MSDS and the precautions listed before

using this substance.

Click here to download copy of MSDS (Material Safety Data Sheet)

Packaging:

Contents of 200 grams comes packed in 250 ml sized wide-mouth amber

glass bottle.