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Material World
Element · Mn

Manganese

The element that made steel workable, and the one nobody mentions when they talk about steel.

Manganese has no glamour and is close to indispensable. Added to steel it removes dissolved oxygen and locks up sulfur, which would otherwise make the metal crack when hot-worked. Essentially all steel contains manganese for this reason, and steelmaking accounts for the overwhelming majority of world production.

Hadfield steel, with around twelve percent manganese, work-hardens under impact: it gets tougher where it is hit. Rock crusher jaws and railway crossings are made of it.

Uses

Almost all manganese goes into steel, and it is not optional. Manganese binds sulfur that would otherwise make hot steel crack, and deoxidises the melt. Steelmaking without it is largely impractical, which makes manganese one of the least discussed and most necessary industrial metals.

Manganese dioxide is the cathode material in ordinary alkaline batteries, and manganese compounds serve as driers in paint and as pigments — the browns and blacks of some of the oldest cave paintings are manganese oxides.

Medium confidence Weak evidence

How we know: checked recently · only one source, so there is nothing to cross-check it against · stated directly by the source.

How this connects

Where a connection has been confirmed by an outside reference, that reference is named beside it.

is used as

  • Alloying — application · present in essentially all steel, to remove oxygen and lock up sulfur

is extracted from

  • Pyrolusite — mineral · the principal manganese ore; nearly all of it goes to steel Wikidata

is produced by

  • Smelting — process · as ferromanganese, by the same route and for the same reason — steel wants the alloy, not the element

is an alternative to

  • Nickel — element · in austenitic stainless steel, where manganese stabilises the same structure at a fraction of the cost — the 200-series grades exist because of it, and they corrode more readily

is a component of

  • Duralumin — alloy · 0–1% · a fraction of a per cent, controlling grain structure

is found in

  • Morganite — mineral variety · the colouring element
  • Kunzite — mineral variety · the colouring element
  • NMC cathode — compound · cheap, structurally useful and electrochemically inert — it is there to hold the lattice together and contributes no capacity
  • Ferrite — material · in the manganese-zinc soft grades, which are the cores in power supplies below about a megahertz
  • Columbite — mineral · substitutes within a solid solution — an individual specimen may hold little of it
  • Pyrolusite — mineral Wikidata

Sources

  • Material World
    Our own writing
  • Wikidata
    Wikimedia Foundation · Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal (public domain dedication)
  • PubChem
    US National Library of Medicine · Mixed — aggregated third-party content, rights retained by depositors
  • NIST — National Institute of Standards and Technology
    United States Department of Commerce · US Government work — public information, credit requested

Questions this page answers

Where it comes from, and what it becomes

Follow Manganese back to what it starts as, and forward into what it becomes. Each step is a documented one — a real route material takes, not a chain of inference.

Upstream — what it comes from

  • Manganese → is produced by (as ferromanganese, by the same route and for the same reason — steel wants the alloy, not the element) → Smelting → takes as input (as the element removed, not added) → Oxygen → is produced by (the largest output by tonnage, and the reason air separation units sit beside steelworks) → Air separation → takes as input (the feedstock, and an unusual one in being free, unlimited and available anywhere — the cost is entirely the energy to liquefy it) → Air
  • Manganese → is extracted from (the principal manganese ore; nearly all of it goes to steel) → Pyrolusite
  • Manganese → is produced by (as ferromanganese, by the same route and for the same reason — steel wants the alloy, not the element) → Smelting → takes as input (roasted to drive off sulfur, then reduced to copper) → Chalcopyrite
  • Manganese → is produced by (as ferromanganese, by the same route and for the same reason — steel wants the alloy, not the element) → Smelting → takes as input (reduced with carbon to metallic tin) → Cassiterite
  • Manganese → is produced by (as ferromanganese, by the same route and for the same reason — steel wants the alloy, not the element) → Smelting → takes as input (reduced with coke in a blast furnace) → Hematite
  • Manganese → is produced by (as ferromanganese, by the same route and for the same reason — steel wants the alloy, not the element) → Smelting → takes as input (the phosphate rock charged to the electric furnace, with coke to reduce it and silica to take up the calcium) → Apatite

These are the most distinct paths back. Manganese can be traced through others besides.

Downstream — what it becomes

  • Manganese → is a component of (a fraction of a per cent, controlling grain structure) → Duralumin → is used as (aircraft structure, which it was developed for and dominated for half a century) → Structural engineering
  • Manganese → is used as (present in essentially all steel, to remove oxygen and lock up sulfur) → Alloying