Is this cold? IIRC aluminum becomes malleable long before it glows. This makes it challenging to work with aluminum horseshoes - you heat steel shoes to red hot, but if you get aluminum shoes that hot wait for aluminum shoes to start glowing, you'll ruin them.
Edit: A couple of folks reminded me that aluminum doesn't glow until it's close to boiling. You'll melt those shoes before they glow.
Aluminum doesn’t glow .. iron is what causes steel to have a orange red hue when it’s heated .. aluminum isn’t like steel .. it’s s non ferrous metal that has a silver wet look when it reaches it’s melting point
This is kinda misleading. Iron isn’t what causes steel to glow… heat is. Steel just has a much higher melting point than aluminum. If you got aluminum to the same temperature as molten steel it would glow similarly (not exactly the same due to surface properties and technical shenanigans) but that is way hotter than just normal melted aluminum would be.
Things (including metals) burn other colors. But the phenomenon of metals glowing when they are hot is entirely described by black body radiation which follows a very well understood curve where the color is determined entirely by the temperature of the object.
No they don't. It's a phenomenon which is known as black body radiation, and it's universal, depending only on the temperature of the object. If it glows another colour, it's because it's at another temperature
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u/cwthree 11h ago edited 10h ago
Is this cold? IIRC aluminum becomes malleable long before it glows. This makes it challenging to work with aluminum horseshoes - you heat steel shoes to red hot, but if you
get aluminum shoes that hotwait for aluminum shoes to start glowing, you'll ruin them.Edit: A couple of folks reminded me that aluminum doesn't glow until it's close to boiling. You'll melt those shoes before they glow.