Knowing the characteristics of gold alloys enables us to get important information for selecting the most suitable alloy composition for each particular production process. Obviously, in the case of gold alloys, color plays a fundamental role in the selection of the composition to be used, but in all cases minor additions of some specific elements can contribute to improving some characteristics that are important in the production process. On the basis of these considerations, we decided to determine the chemical and physical properties of several 9, 10, 14 and 18 karat gold alloys. The aim of this work is to correlate the characteristics of each alloy with the chemical composition in order to select the gold alloy representing the optimum solution for the different practical uses. Considering the high cost of the alloys, we have refined some methods for evaluating the properties of precious alloys (or better, we improved evaluation methods already used in different industry sectors) to obtain the data required to achieve this goal.

Author(s): Mauro Di Siro, Daniele Maggian, David Frizzo, Silvano Bortolamei