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Encyclopedic overview
Annealing a silver strip
In metallurgy and materials science, annealing is a heat treatment that alters the physical and sometimes chemical properties of a material to increase its ductility and reduce its hardness, making it more workable. It involves heating a material above its recrystallization temperature, maintaining a suitable temperature for an appropriate amount of time, and then cooling.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “annealing” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.