Describe what is meant by ductile and malleable and how the makeup of metallic bonding leads to both propertie?

Ductile means ';able to be pulled out'; for example it is possible to draw copper out into a thin wire - that is ductility. Malleable simply means ';able to exhibit plastic deformation under stress';, so for example, clay is malleable, but it's not particulary ductile.





Metallic bonding features valence shell electrons that are delocalised such that the charge clouds are shared between a large number of the metal atoms. This means that the metal atoms can slide past each other without any strong repulsive forces being encountered. When metallic bonding is NOT prominent, this does not occur, and the strong repulsive forces cause fracture.





Malleability and ductility are therefore influenced by similar factors, the main difference being that ductility refers to a shear force, wheareas malleability can refer to compression forces as well.

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