Measurements of Electrical Specific Action to Melt for Brass and Aluminum Alloys

This paper describes a novel method for determining the specific action to melt the metals, and reports the values for action to melt that measure for several elements and three alloys: aluminum 2024, aluminum 6061, and C27400 brass. We electrically heat small diameter wires (127 $\mu{\rm m}$ ) to the point of vaporization using a slow regime exploding wire experiment. Using high-resolution voltage and current data, we compute the derivative of electrical resistivity with respect to specific electrical action. Features in the plot of this derivative clearly show the onset of melting for many of the materials we tested. We compare our results for copper, silver, aluminum, molybdenum, and titanium to those published by Tucker and Toth in the 1970s. Our data agree with their published values for silver and molybdenum, but not with those for copper, aluminum, and titanium. This paper presents our results and discusses possible reasons for the discrepancies between some of our measurements and those of Tucker and Toth.