Indium metal really shines when it comes to bonding a wide variety of surfaces together.
Indium has several characteristics that make it an excellent candidate to bond or seal both metals and non-metals.
- It stays pliable at cryogenic (-150C) temperatures. This means that indium seals that are exposed to these cold temperatures will not crack or fail like other metals will.
- Indium is great for bonding non-metallics such as glass, quartz and certain ceramics.
- Since metals expand at different rates, this mismatch can cause a bond to break during heating and cooling. Indium compensates for these differences.
- Indium cold welds to itself so you can apply an indium coating to two surfaces like glass, quartz or certain ceramics that cannot be soldered and cold weld them together.