in this video we're going to take a look at metallic bonding which is the type of bonding you get between metal atoms and we'll see how this gives rise to the characteristic properties of metals then lastly we'll consider how alloys differ from pure metals to recap we've already seen that metals bond to non-metals through ionic bonding and that non-metals bond to other non-metals through covalent bonding now we turned our metals bond to other metals which we call metallic bonding if we think of a solid metal it basically consists of a giant structure of atoms that are arranged in a regular pattern in this picture we've shown each atom surrounded by the electrons in its outermost shell when all these atoms are together in a metal though they actually give up these outer shell electrons and share them with all the other atoms in the metal this means that the atoms will all become positive ions because they've lost negative electrons and because those electrons are now free to move about we call them delocalized electrons so there will now be loads of strong electrostatic attraction between the positive ions and the negative electrons and it's these forces of attraction which hold everything together in a regular structure so we call this metallic bonding this gives the overall metal strength and means that most metallic structures have high melting and boiling points so are solid at room temperature they are also good conductors of electricity and heat because the delocalized electrons can carry electrical current and thermal energy throughout the structure another important property is that metals are malleable which means that they can easily be bent or hammered into shapes for example into thin sheets this can be a bit confusing because we think of metals as being strong and in many ways they are but the fact that metals have such a regular structure means that the different layers can slide over one another so they're not quite as fixed as you might have thought at least that's the case for pure metals if we want a harder metal that won't bend so easily then we can make alloys which contain two or more different elements we make these either by mixing together two different metals or sometimes a metal and a non-metal and we generally pick elements that have different sized atoms the reason that this helps is that the combination of different sized atoms disrupts the metals regular structure and means that the layers can no longer slide over one another making the alloy much harder than pure metal in our example here we've shown steel which is made up mostly of iron but also contains one to two percent carbon it also sometimes contains chromium manganese or vanadium depending on which properties we wanted to have and this gives it the strength that it needs to be used in things like cars and planes anyway that's all for today so if you enjoyed it then please do give us a like and subscribe and we'll see you next time