So in a fictional world –
Can a character melt a metal if he applies the pressure (equally distributed) to a metal body? Will application of indefinite amount of pressure on a small metal eventually lead to a change in it’s state? From solid to liquid-ish?
Please help
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Even in the real world most aluminum profiles are done using cold extrusion where the feedstock is just pushed through a die with a large pressure forming the aluminum.
No. If you look at most phase diagrams for metals you’ll find that from the triple point (the temperature-pressure at which a substance exists in all three phases) the “melting/freezing” line (the line which delineates the solid and liquid zones from each other) moves to the right and (usually) in a hyperbolic exponential function.
This means for *any* given temperature, there is a pressure above which a substance will most certainly be solid. So for a theoretically “infinite” pressure there can exist no temperature that will exceed that pressure to melt the substance in question.
Short answer: Maybe.
Since your world is fictional, you can do things however you’d like.
Realistically, the answer is “sort of”. Solids for the most part do not liquefy under high pressure. However, under very strong forces, many solids can act like liquids. Not so much pressure, mind you, since that comes from all sides, but if a very strong force pushed aluminum through a hole, then the aluminum would pass through much like play-doh.
At high enough pressures, your solid stops being regular matter at all and you’re left with the stuff neutron stars are made of – at first just a soup of electrons and protons, and then solid neutrons.
No as the energy spent in compressing the material is utilized to deform it. This utilization is slightly inefficient. The heating of metal observed during compression is due to this inefficiency as the lost energy escapes as heat. Since the majority of energy goes in the compression, the material failure will occur with a fracture well before it does with melting
Goes the other way. As pressure increases, liquids tend to solidify. This also applies to the reverse, if you decrease pressure liquids will tend to boil.
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