The industrial race for being the top and the best in the game of crafting metallurgical microscopes and putting into the commercial hard court the ever competitive feat of understanding metals microstructure are always on a green light mode. When manufacturers equipped themselves with their run-and-gun, up-tempo style of fabricating metallographic instruments, operational jinks and hinge are always found forcibly sidelined so as to make franchise owners themselves step out of their spectators’ seat, and thereby assume a more active role in drawing the winning formula for metallurgical microscopy.

It has already been a prominent bread-and-butter play of having had cutting edge technologies in divulging metal microstructures. It is as well given that metals of pure composition possessed certain thermal tendencies among varying temperature extremes. What, however, caught the attention of manufacturers, who design metallographic microscopes capable of divulging metal microstructures, are the sorts of metals where homogeneity is nothing but a myth. Talking much straighter then, industrialists specifically refer to metals added with an alloy or two. Based on microscopic studies, it was found out that almost all metals are actually alloys that contain residual and incorporated metallic and nonmetallic elements dissolved in another metal as the base solvent. It is logical to note then that these integrated metal microstructures and elements are very much capable of inducing dramatic effects on the end product of the alloys especially in its properties. Aside from such obvious hypothesis, however, the way the dissolution is carried out also posed certain crucial implications.

When metal microstructures and elements combine with each other and with the existing atoms in the parent metal crystal lattice, dramatic twists and turns is triggered both in the physical and nonphysical phase of the resultant metal piece. Fundamentally speaking, manufacturers of metallurgical instruments that view and record metal microstructures, point out on the mechanisms of these alloys’ solvent-solute complex. It is said that there are a couple of ways by which the alloying element and the base parent metal react and mix with each other. With the former being the solute and the latter the solvent, a working principle is in action such that the alloy’s atoms merge with the base either trough direct substitution or interstitial combination. Literally, in the first case, a substitutional solid solution is created while an interstitial solid mixture is made in the second. According to metallographic microscopists working on metals microstructure, a substitutional solid concoction is attained when the alloy’s atoms are apparently similar to the parent’s metal’s atoms. In consequence, then, the alloy’s microelements virtually take the place of the parent metal’s atoms in the metal matrix. A newly made metal is then allowed to undergo dissolution in the base metal which paved the way for the creation of a solid solution. Specifically speaking, particular examples include dissolving copper in nickel, gold in silver and carbon in iron. On the other hand, interstitial solid solution is obtained when the alloy’s atoms tend to be smaller than the parent metal’s atoms, and such must work in a way that those atoms must fit and successfully blend themselves in the parent metal’s lattice. As metallurgical experts working on metal microstructures put it, the alloy atoms don’t reside within any lattice sites, and has therefore led to the conclusion that the atoms don’t take the place of any of the original atoms. As a result of this metal microstructures blending, certain strains in the crystal structure exists. Specific examples, meanwhile, include small traces of copper being dissolved in aluminum and carbon and nitrogen dissolved in iron and other metals.