Tin is a kind of silvery white and soft metal. It is similar to lead and zinc, but it looks brighter. Its hardness is relatively low, and it can be cut with a knife. It has good ductility, especially when the temperature is 100°C, it can develop extremely thin tin foil, and its thickness can be as thin as 0.04 mm.
Tin is also a low-melting metal. Its melting point is only 232°C. Therefore, a candle flame can be used to melt it into a mercury-like fluid liquid.
Pure tin has a peculiar property: when the tin rod and the tin plate are bent, it will give off a special kind of crackling sound that seems to be crying. This sound is emitted by a friction caused between the crystals. When the crystal is deformed, such friction occurs. The strange thing is that if the tin alloy is changed, it will not make such cries when it is deformed. Therefore, it is often based on this characteristic of tin to identify whether a piece of metal is tin.
One of the main uses of tin metal is to make tinplate. Tinplate is often referred to as "tinplate", which is a tin plated tin. Do not look at the thin tin layer above, but it is a very useful "coat." The iron coat put on this coat is not only beautiful, but also has obtained many excellent properties.
Then, what are the fine qualities of the “clothing†of tin? To put it simply, it is: It can resist both corrosion and poison.
Why tinplate has such a good quality? This is inseparable from the nature of Tin. It turned out that the chemical properties of tin are very stable. It does not react chemically with water, even if the long-term contact with moist air it also will gradually form a thick oxide film on its surface, this film can be prevented from continuing tin oxide, which is plated the reason tin metal anti-corrosion.
Further, the effect of tin with inorganic acids diffuse very slowly, with an organic effect hardly occurs, and tin salts are generally non-toxic, therefore, tinplate often used as food packaging materials, such as food cans , biscuit boxes.