Brass patented a technique for the first industrial scale distillation of metallic zinc known as "distillation per descencum" or "the English process." This local zinc was used in speltering and allowed greater control over the zinc content of brass and the production of high-zinc copper alloys which would have been difficult or impossible to produce using cementation, for use in expensive objects such as scientific instruments, clocks, brass buttons and costume jewellery. However Champion continued to use the cheaper calamine cementation method to produce lower-zinc brass and the archaeological remains of bee-hive shaped cementation furnaces have been identified at his works
High entropy alloys greater than or equal to 1.1 to promote solid solution development. The atomic radii of the components must also be similar in order to form a solid solution. Zhang et al. proposed a parameter δ representing the difference in atomic radii: where r is the atomic radius of element i and formula_8. Formation of a solid solution phase requires a δ≤6.6%, but some alloys with 4%<δ≤6.6% do form intermetallics. For those alloys that do form solid solutions, an additional empirical parameter has been proposed to predict the crystal structure that will form. If the average valence electron concentration (VEC) of