Specifications: Tungsten Tungsten, also called wolfram, is a chemical element that has the symbol W (German: Wolfram) and atomic number 74. A very hard, heavy, steel-gray to white transition metal, tungsten is found in several ores including wolframite and scheelite and is remarkable for its robust physical properties, especially the fact that it has the highest melting point of all the non-alloyed metals and the second highest of all the elements after carbon. The pure form is used mainly in electrical applications but its many compounds and alloys are widely used in many applications, most notably in light bulb filaments, in X-ray tubes (as both the filament and target), and in superalloys. Tungsten is the only metal from the third transition series that is known to occur in biomolecules. Naturally occurring tungsten consists of five isotopes whose half-lives are so long that they can be considered stable. All can decay into isotopes of element 72 (hafnium) by alpha emission; 180W has been observed to have a half life of 1.8 ± 0.2 Ea. The other naturally occurring isotopes have not been observed to decay, constraining their half-lives to be: 182W, T1/2 > 8.3 Ea; 184W, T1/2 > 29 Ea; 185W, T1/2 > 13 Ea; 186W, T1/2 > 27 Ea. [1] On average, two alpha decays of 180W occur in one gram of natural tungsten per year. 27 artificial radioisotopes of tungsten have been characterized, the most stable of which are 181W with a half-life of 121.2 days, 185W with a half-life of 75.1 days, 188W with a half-life of 69.4 days and 178W with a half-life of 21.6 days. All of the remaining radioactive isotopes have half-lives of less than 24 hours, and most of these have half-lives that are less than 8 minutes. Tungsten also has 4 meta states, the most stable being 179mW.
