Zirconium
Zirconium is a chemical element with symbol Zr and atomic number 40. The name zirconium is taken from the name of the mineral zircon, the most important source of zirconium, it is a lustrous, grey-white, strong transition metal that resembles hafnium and, to a lesser extent, titanium. Zirconium is used as a refractory and opacifier, although small amounts are used as an alloying agent for its strong resistance to corrosion. Zirconium forms a variety of inorganic and organometallic compounds such as zirconium dioxide and zirconocene dichloride, respectively. Five isotopes occur three of which are stable. Zirconium compounds have no known biological role. Zirconium is a lustrous, greyish-white, ductile, malleable metal, solid at room temperature, though it is hard and brittle at lesser purities. In powder form, zirconium is flammable, but the solid form is much less prone to ignition. Zirconium is resistant to corrosion by alkalis, salt water and other agents. However, it will dissolve in hydrochloric and sulfuric acid when fluorine is present.
Alloys with zinc are magnetic at less than 35 K. The melting point of zirconium is 1855 °C, the boiling point is 4371 °C. Zirconium has an electronegativity of 1.33 on the Pauling scale. Of the elements within the d-block with known electronegativities, zirconium has the fifth lowest electronegativity after hafnium, yttrium and actinium. At room temperature zirconium exhibits a hexagonally close-packed crystal structure, α-Zr, which changes to β-Zr, a body-centered cubic crystal structure, at 863 °C. Zirconium exists in the β-phase until the melting point. Occurring zirconium is composed of five isotopes. 90Zr, 91Zr, 92Zr and 94Zr are stable, although 94Zr is predicted to undergo double beta decay with a half-life of more than 1.10×1017 years. 96Zr has a half-life of 2.4×1019 years, is the longest-lived radioisotope of zirconium. Of these natural isotopes, 90Zr is the most common. 96Zr is the least common, comprising only 2.80% of zirconium. Twenty-eight artificial isotopes of zirconium have been synthesized, ranging in atomic mass from 78 to 110.
93Zr is the longest-lived artificial isotope, with a half-life of 1.53×106 years. 110Zr, the heaviest isotope of zirconium, is the most radioactive, with an estimated half-life of 30 milliseconds. Radioactive isotopes at or above mass number 93 decay by electron emission, whereas those at or below 89 decay by positron emission; the only exception is 88Zr. Five isotopes of zirconium exist as metastable isomers: 83mZr, 85mZr, 89mZr, 90m1Zr, 90m2Zr and 91mZr. Of these, 90m2Zr has the shortest half-life at 131 nanoseconds. 89mZr is the longest lived with a half-life of 4.161 minutes. Zirconium has a concentration of about 130 mg/kg within the Earth's crust and about 0.026 μg/L in sea water. It is not found in nature as a native metal, reflecting its intrinsic instability with respect to water; the principal commercial source of zirconium is zircon, a silicate mineral, found in Australia, India, South Africa and the United States, as well as in smaller deposits around the world. As of 2013, two-thirds of zircon mining occurs in South Africa.
Zircon resources exceed 60 million tonnes worldwide and annual worldwide zirconium production is 900,000 tonnes. Zirconium occurs in more than 140 other minerals, including the commercially useful ores baddeleyite and kosnarite. Zirconium is abundant in S-type stars, it has been detected in the sun and in meteorites. Lunar rock samples brought back from several Apollo missions to the moon have a high zirconium oxide content relative to terrestrial rocks. Zirconium is a by-product of the mining and processing of the titanium minerals ilmenite and rutile, as well as tin mining. From 2003 to 2007, while prices for the mineral zircon increased from $360 to $840 per tonne, the price for unwrought zirconium metal decreased from $39,900 to $22,700 per ton. Zirconium metal is much higher priced than zircon. Collected from coastal waters, zircon-bearing sand is purified by spiral concentrators to remove lighter materials, which are returned to the water because they are natural components of beach sand.
Using magnetic separation, the titanium ores ilmenite and rutile are removed. Most zircon is used directly in commercial applications, but a small percentage is converted to the metal. Most Zr metal is produced by the reduction of the zirconium chloride with magnesium metal in the Kroll process; the resulting metal is sintered until sufficiently ductile for metalworking. Commercial zirconium metal contains 1–3% of hafnium, not problematic because the chemical properties of hafnium and zirconium are similar, their neutron-absorbing properties differ however, necessitating the separation of hafnium from zirconium for nuclear reactors. Several separation schemes are in use; the liquid-liquid extraction of the thiocyanate-oxide derivatives exploits the fact that the hafnium derivative is more soluble in methyl isobutyl ketone than in water. This method is used in United States. Zr and Hf can be separated by fractional crystallization of potassium hexafluorozirconate, less soluble in water than the analogous hafnium derivative.
Fractional distillation of the tetrachlorides called extractive distillation, is used in Europe. The product of a quadruple VAM process, combined with hot extruding and different rolling application
Salinity
Salinity is the saltiness or amount of salt dissolved in a body of water, called saline water. This is measured in g salt k g sea water. Salinity is an important factor in determining many aspects of the chemistry of natural waters and of biological processes within it, is a thermodynamic state variable that, along with temperature and pressure, governs physical characteristics like the density and heat capacity of the water. A contour line of constant salinity is called an isohaline, or sometimes isohale. Salinity in rivers and the ocean is conceptually simple, but technically challenging to define and measure precisely. Conceptually the salinity is the quantity of dissolved salt content of the water. Salts are compounds like sodium chloride, magnesium sulfate, potassium nitrate, sodium bicarbonate which dissolve into ions; the concentration of dissolved chloride ions is sometimes referred to as chlorinity. Operationally, dissolved matter is defined as that which can pass through a fine filter.
Salinity can be expressed in the form of a mass fraction, i.e. the mass of the dissolved material in a unit mass of solution. Seawater has a mass salinity of around 35 g/kg, although lower values are typical near coasts where rivers enter the ocean. Rivers and lakes can have a wide range of salinities, from less than 0.01 g/kg to a few g/kg, although there are many places where higher salinities are found. The Dead Sea has a salinity of more than 200 g/kg. Rainwater before touching the ground has a TDS of 20 mg/L or less. Whatever pore size is used in the definition, the resulting salinity value of a given sample of natural water will not vary by more than a few percent. Physical oceanographers working in the abyssal ocean, are concerned with precision and intercomparability of measurements by different researchers, at different times, to five significant digits. A bottled seawater product known as IAPSO Standard Seawater is used by oceanographers to standardize their measurements with enough precision to meet this requirement.
Measurement and definition difficulties arise because natural waters contain a complex mixture of many different elements from different sources in different molecular forms. The chemical properties of some of these forms depend on pressure. Many of these forms are difficult to measure with high accuracy, in any case complete chemical analysis is not practical when analyzing multiple samples. Different practical definitions of salinity result from different attempts to account for these problems, to different levels of precision, while still remaining reasonably easy to use. For practical reasons salinity is related to the sum of masses of a subset of these dissolved chemical constituents, rather than to the unknown mass of salts that gave rise to this composition. For many purposes this sum can be limited to a set of eight major ions in natural waters, although for seawater at highest precision an additional seven minor ions are included; the major ions dominate the inorganic composition of most natural waters.
Exceptions include some pit waters from some hydrothermal springs. The concentrations of dissolved gases like oxygen and nitrogen are not included in descriptions of salinity. However, carbon dioxide gas, which when dissolved is converted into carbonates and bicarbonates, is included. Silicon in the form of silicic acid, which appears as a neutral molecule in the pH range of most natural waters, may be included for some purposes; the term'salinity' is, for oceanographers associated with one of a set of specific measurement techniques. As the dominant techniques evolve, so do different descriptions of salinity. Salinities were measured using titration-based techniques before the 1980s. Titration with silver nitrate could be used to determine the concentration of halide ions to give a chlorinity; the chlorinity was multiplied by a factor to account for all other constituents. The resulting'Knudsen salinities' are expressed in units of parts per thousand; the use of electrical conductivity measurements to estimate the ionic content of seawater led to the development of the scale called the practical salinity scale 1978.
Salinities measured using PSS-78 do not have units. The suffix psu or PSU is sometimes added to PSS-78 measurement values. In 2010 a new standard for the properties of seawater called the thermodynamic equation of seawater 2010 was introduced, advocating absolute salinity as a replacement for practical salinity, conservative temperature as a replacement for potential temperature; this standard includes. Absolute salinities on this scale are expressed as a mass fraction, in grams per kilogram of solution. Salinities on this scale are determined by combining electrical conductivity measurements with other information that can account for regional changes in the composition of seawater, they can be determined by making direct density measurements. A sample of seawater from most locations with a chlorinity of 19.37 ppt will have a Knudsen salinity of 35.00 ppt, a PSS-78 practical
Niobium
Niobium known as columbium, is a chemical element with symbol Nb and atomic number 41. It is a soft, crystalline, ductile transition metal found in the minerals pyrochlore and columbite, hence the former name "columbium", its name comes from Greek mythology Niobe, the daughter of Tantalus, the namesake of tantalum. The name reflects the great similarity between the two elements in their physical and chemical properties, making them difficult to distinguish; the English chemist Charles Hatchett reported a new element similar to tantalum in 1801 and named it columbium. In 1809, the English chemist William Hyde Wollaston wrongly concluded that tantalum and columbium were identical; the German chemist Heinrich Rose determined in 1846 that tantalum ores contain a second element, which he named niobium. In 1864 and 1865, a series of scientific findings clarified that niobium and columbium were the same element, for a century both names were used interchangeably. Niobium was adopted as the name of the element in 1949, but the name columbium remains in current use in metallurgy in the United States.
It was not until the early 20th century. Brazil is the leading producer of an alloy of 60 -- 70 % niobium with iron. Niobium is used in alloys, the largest part in special steel such as that used in gas pipelines. Although these alloys contain a maximum of 0.1%, the small percentage of niobium enhances the strength of the steel. The temperature stability of niobium-containing superalloys is important for its use in jet and rocket engines. Niobium is used in various superconducting materials; these superconducting alloys containing titanium and tin, are used in the superconducting magnets of MRI scanners. Other applications of niobium include welding, nuclear industries, optics and jewelry. In the last two applications, the low toxicity and iridescence produced by anodization are desired properties. Niobium is considered a technology-critical element. Niobium was identified by English chemist Charles Hatchett in 1801, he found a new element in a mineral sample, sent to England from Connecticut, United States in 1734 by John Winthrop F.
R. S. and named the mineral columbite and the new element columbium after Columbia, the poetical name for the United States. The columbium discovered by Hatchett was a mixture of the new element with tantalum. Subsequently, there was considerable confusion over the difference between columbium and the related tantalum. In 1809, English chemist William Hyde Wollaston compared the oxides derived from both columbium—columbite, with a density 5.918 g/cm3, tantalum—tantalite, with a density over 8 g/cm3, concluded that the two oxides, despite the significant difference in density, were identical. This conclusion was disputed in 1846 by German chemist Heinrich Rose, who argued that there were two different elements in the tantalite sample, named them after children of Tantalus: niobium and pelopium; this confusion arose from the minimal observed differences between niobium. The claimed new elements pelopium and dianium were in fact identical to niobium or mixtures of niobium and tantalum; the differences between tantalum and niobium were unequivocally demonstrated in 1864 by Christian Wilhelm Blomstrand and Henri Etienne Sainte-Claire Deville, as well as Louis J. Troost, who determined the formulas of some of the compounds in 1865 and by Swiss chemist Jean Charles Galissard de Marignac in 1866, who all proved that there were only two elements.
Articles on ilmenium continued to appear until 1871. De Marignac was the first to prepare the metal in 1864, when he reduced niobium chloride by heating it in an atmosphere of hydrogen. Although de Marignac was able to produce tantalum-free niobium on a larger scale by 1866, it was not until the early 20th century that niobium was used in incandescent lamp filaments, the first commercial application; this use became obsolete through the replacement of niobium with tungsten, which has a higher melting point. That niobium improves the strength of steel was first discovered in the 1920s, this application remains its predominant use. In 1961, the American physicist Eugene Kunzler and coworkers at Bell Labs discovered that niobium-tin continues to exhibit superconductivity in the presence of strong electric currents and magnetic fields, making it the first material to support the high currents and fields necessary for useful high-power magnets and electrical power machinery; this discovery enabled — two decades — the production of long multi-strand cables wound into coils to create large, powerful electromagnets for rotating machinery, particle accelerators, particle detectors.
Columbium was the name bestowed by Hatchett upon his discovery of the metal in 1801. The name reflected; this name remained in use in American journals—the last paper published by American Chemical Society with columbium in its title dates from 1953—while niobium was used in Europe. To end this confusion, the name niobium was chosen for element 41 at the 15th Conference of the Union of Chemistry in Amsterdam in 1949. A year this name was adopted by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry after 100 years of controversy, despite the chronological precedence of the name columbium; this was a compromise of sorts.
Encyclopædia Britannica, Eleventh Edition
The Encyclopædia Britannica, Eleventh Edition is a 29-volume reference work, an edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. It was developed during the encyclopaedia's transition from a British to an American publication; some of its articles were written by the best-known scholars of the time. This edition of the encyclopedia, containing 40,000 entries, is now in the public domain, many of its articles have been used as a basis for articles in Wikipedia. However, the outdated nature of some of its content makes its use as a source for modern scholarship problematic; some articles have special value and interest to modern scholars as cultural artifacts of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The 1911 eleventh edition was assembled with the management of American publisher Horace Everett Hooper. Hugh Chisholm, who had edited the previous edition, was appointed editor in chief, with Walter Alison Phillips as his principal assistant editor. Hooper bought the rights to the 25-volume 9th edition and persuaded the British newspaper The Times to issue its reprint, with eleven additional volumes as the tenth edition, published in 1902.
Hooper's association with The Times ceased in 1909, he negotiated with the Cambridge University Press to publish the 29-volume eleventh edition. Though it is perceived as a quintessentially British work, the eleventh edition had substantial American influences, not only in the increased amount of American and Canadian content, but in the efforts made to make it more popular. American marketing methods assisted sales; some 14% of the contributors were from North America, a New York office was established to coordinate their work. The initials of the encyclopedia's contributors appear at the end of selected articles or at the end of a section in the case of longer articles, such as that on China, a key is given in each volume to these initials; some articles were written by the best-known scholars of the time, such as Edmund Gosse, J. B. Bury, Algernon Charles Swinburne, John Muir, Peter Kropotkin, T. H. Huxley, James Hopwood Jeans and William Michael Rossetti. Among the lesser-known contributors were some who would become distinguished, such as Ernest Rutherford and Bertrand Russell.
Many articles were carried over from some with minimal updating. Some of the book-length articles were divided into smaller parts for easier reference, yet others much abridged; the best-known authors contributed only a single article or part of an article. Most of the work was done by British Museum scholars and other scholars; the 1911 edition was the first edition of the encyclopædia to include more than just a handful of female contributors, with 34 women contributing articles to the edition. The eleventh edition introduced a number of changes of the format of the Britannica, it was the first to be published complete, instead of the previous method of volumes being released as they were ready. The print type was subject to continual updating until publication, it was the first edition of Britannica to be issued with a comprehensive index volume in, added a categorical index, where like topics were listed. It was the first not to include long treatise-length articles. Though the overall length of the work was about the same as that of its predecessor, the number of articles had increased from 17,000 to 40,000.
It was the first edition of Britannica to include biographies of living people. Sixteen maps of the famous 9th edition of Stielers Handatlas were translated to English, converted to Imperial units, printed in Gotha, Germany by Justus Perthes and became part this edition. Editions only included Perthes' great maps as low quality reproductions. According to Coleman and Simmons, the content of the encyclopedia was distributed as follows: Hooper sold the rights to Sears Roebuck of Chicago in 1920, completing the Britannica's transition to becoming a American publication. In 1922, an additional three volumes, were published, covering the events of the intervening years, including World War I. These, together with a reprint of the eleventh edition, formed the twelfth edition of the work. A similar thirteenth edition, consisting of three volumes plus a reprint of the twelfth edition, was published in 1926, so the twelfth and thirteenth editions were related to the eleventh edition and shared much of the same content.
However, it became apparent that a more thorough update of the work was required. The fourteenth edition, published in 1929, was revised, with much text eliminated or abridged to make room for new topics; the eleventh edition was the basis of every version of the Encyclopædia Britannica until the new fifteenth edition was published in 1974, using modern information presentation. The eleventh edition's articles are still of value and interest to modern readers and scholars as a cultural artifact: the British Empire was at its maximum, imperialism was unchallenged, much of the world was still ruled by monarchs, the tragedy of the modern world wars was still in the future, they are an invaluable resource for topics omitted from modern encyclopedias for biography and the history of science and technology. As a literary text, the encyclopedia has value as an example of early 20th-century prose. For example, it employs literary devices, such as pathetic fallacy, which are not as common in modern reference texts.
In 1917, using the pseudonym of S. S. Van Dine, the US art critic and author Willard Huntington Wright published Misinforming a Nation, a 200+
Tungsten
Tungsten, or wolfram, is a chemical element with symbol W and atomic number 74. The name tungsten comes from the former Swedish name for the tungstate mineral scheelite, tung sten or "heavy stone". Tungsten is a rare metal found on Earth exclusively combined with other elements in chemical compounds rather than alone, it was identified as a new element in 1781 and first isolated as a metal in 1783. Its important ores include scheelite; the free element is remarkable for its robustness the fact that it has the highest melting point of all the elements discovered, melting at 3422 °C. It has the highest boiling point, at 5930 °C, its density is 19.3 times that of water, comparable to that of uranium and gold, much higher than that of lead. Polycrystalline tungsten is an intrinsically hard material, making it difficult to work. However, pure single-crystalline tungsten can be cut with a hard-steel hacksaw. Tungsten's many alloys have numerous applications, including incandescent light bulb filaments, X-ray tubes, electrodes in gas tungsten arc welding and radiation shielding.
Tungsten's hardness and high density give it military applications in penetrating projectiles. Tungsten compounds are often used as industrial catalysts. Tungsten is the only metal from the third transition series, known to occur in biomolecules that are found in a few species of bacteria and archaea, it is the heaviest element known to be essential to any living organism. However, tungsten interferes with molybdenum and copper metabolism and is somewhat toxic to more familiar forms of animal life. In its raw form, tungsten is a hard steel-grey metal, brittle and hard to work. If made pure, tungsten retains its hardness, becomes malleable enough that it can be worked easily, it is worked by drawing, or extruding. Tungsten objects are commonly formed by sintering. Of all metals in pure form, tungsten has the highest melting point, lowest vapor pressure, the highest tensile strength. Although carbon remains solid at higher temperatures than tungsten, carbon sublimes at atmospheric pressure instead of melting, so it has no melting point.
Tungsten has the lowest coefficient of thermal expansion of any pure metal. The low thermal expansion and high melting point and tensile strength of tungsten originate from strong covalent bonds formed between tungsten atoms by the 5d electrons. Alloying small quantities of tungsten with steel increases its toughness. Tungsten exists in two major crystalline forms: α and β; the former is the more stable form. The structure of the β phase is called A15 cubic. Contrary to the α phase which crystallizes in isometric grains, the β form exhibits a columnar habit; the α phase has one third of the electrical resistivity and a much lower superconducting transition temperature TC relative to the β phase: ca. 0.015 K vs. 1–4 K. The TC value can be raised by alloying tungsten with another metal; such tungsten alloys are sometimes used in low-temperature superconducting circuits. Occurring tungsten consists of four stable isotopes and one long-lived radioisotope, 180W. Theoretically, all five can decay into isotopes of element 72 by alpha emission, but only 180W has been observed to do so, with a half-life of ×1018 years.
The other occurring isotopes have not been observed to decay, constraining their half-lives to be at least 4 × 1021 years. Another 30 artificial radioisotopes of tungsten have been characterized, the most stable of which are 181W with a half-life of 121.2 days, 185W with a half-life of 75.1 days, 188W with a half-life of 69.4 days, 178W with a half-life of 21.6 days, 187W with a half-life of 23.72 h. All of the remaining radioactive isotopes have half-lives of less than 3 hours, most of these have half-lives below 8 minutes. Tungsten has 11 meta states, with the most stable being 179mW. Elemental tungsten resists attack by oxygen and alkalis; the most common formal oxidation state of tungsten is +6, but it exhibits all oxidation states from −2 to +6. Tungsten combines with oxygen to form the yellow tungstic oxide, WO3, which dissolves in aqueous alkaline solutions to form tungstate ions, WO2−4. Tungsten carbides are produced by heating powdered tungsten with carbon. W2C is resistant to chemical attack, although it reacts with chlorine to form tungsten hexachloride.
In aqueous solution, tungstate gives the heteropoly acids and polyoxometalate anions under neutral and acidic conditions. As tungstate is progressively treated with acid, it first yields the soluble, metastable "paratungstate A" anion, W7O6–24, which over time converts to the less soluble "paratungstate B" anion, H2W12O10–42. Further acidification produces the soluble metatungstate anion, H2W12O6–40, after which equilibrium is reached; the metatungstate ion exists as a symmetric cluster of twelve tungsten-oxygen octahedra known as the Keggin anion. Many other polyoxometalate anions exist as metastable species; the inclusion of a different atom such as phosphorus in place of the two central hydrogens in metatungstate produces a wide v
Isotope
Isotopes are variants of a particular chemical element which differ in neutron number, in nucleon number. All isotopes of a given element have the same number of protons but different numbers of neutrons in each atom; the term isotope is formed from the Greek roots isos and topos, meaning "the same place". It was coined by a Scottish doctor and writer Margaret Todd in 1913 in a suggestion to chemist Frederick Soddy; the number of protons within the atom's nucleus is called atomic number and is equal to the number of electrons in the neutral atom. Each atomic number identifies a specific element, but not the isotope; the number of nucleons in the nucleus is the atom's mass number, each isotope of a given element has a different mass number. For example, carbon-12, carbon-13, carbon-14 are three isotopes of the element carbon with mass numbers 12, 13, 14, respectively; the atomic number of carbon is 6, which means that every carbon atom has 6 protons, so that the neutron numbers of these isotopes are 6, 7, 8 respectively.
A nuclide is a species of an atom with a specific number of protons and neutrons in the nucleus, for example carbon-13 with 6 protons and 7 neutrons. The nuclide concept emphasizes nuclear properties over chemical properties, whereas the isotope concept emphasizes chemical over nuclear; the neutron number has large effects on nuclear properties, but its effect on chemical properties is negligible for most elements. In the case of the lightest elements where the ratio of neutron number to atomic number varies the most between isotopes it has only a small effect, although it does matter in some circumstances; the term isotopes is intended to imply comparison, for example: the nuclides 126C, 136C, 146C are isotopes, but 4018Ar, 4019K, 4020Ca are isobars. However, because isotope is the older term, it is better known than nuclide, is still sometimes used in contexts where nuclide might be more appropriate, such as nuclear technology and nuclear medicine. An isotope and/or nuclide is specified by the name of the particular element followed by a hyphen and the mass number.
When a chemical symbol is used, e.g. "C" for carbon, standard notation is to indicate the mass number with a superscript at the upper left of the chemical symbol and to indicate the atomic number with a subscript at the lower left. Because the atomic number is given by the element symbol, it is common to state only the mass number in the superscript and leave out the atomic number subscript; the letter m is sometimes appended after the mass number to indicate a nuclear isomer, a metastable or energetically-excited nuclear state, for example 180m73Ta. The common pronunciation of the AZE notation is different from how it is written: 42He is pronounced as helium-four instead of four-two-helium, 23592U as uranium two-thirty-five or uranium-two-three-five instead of 235-92-uranium; some isotopes/nuclides are radioactive, are therefore referred to as radioisotopes or radionuclides, whereas others have never been observed to decay radioactively and are referred to as stable isotopes or stable nuclides.
For example, 14C is a radioactive form of carbon, whereas 12C and 13C are stable isotopes. There are about 339 occurring nuclides on Earth, of which 286 are primordial nuclides, meaning that they have existed since the Solar System's formation. Primordial nuclides include 32 nuclides with long half-lives and 253 that are formally considered as "stable nuclides", because they have not been observed to decay. In most cases, for obvious reasons, if an element has stable isotopes, those isotopes predominate in the elemental abundance found on Earth and in the Solar System. However, in the cases of three elements the most abundant isotope found in nature is one long-lived radioisotope of the element, despite these elements having one or more stable isotopes. Theory predicts that many "stable" isotopes/nuclides are radioactive, with long half-lives; some stable nuclides are in theory energetically susceptible to other known forms of decay, such as alpha decay or double beta decay, but no decay products have yet been observed, so these isotopes are said to be "observationally stable".
The predicted half-lives for these nuclides greatly exceed the estimated age of the universe, in fact there are 27 known radionuclides with half-lives longer than the age of the universe. Adding in the radioactive nuclides that have been created artificially, there are 3,339 known nuclides; these include 905 nuclides that are either stable or have half-lives
Rare-earth element
A rare-earth element or rare-earth metal, as defined by IUPAC, is one of a set of seventeen chemical elements in the periodic table the fifteen lanthanides, as well as scandium and yttrium. Scandium and yttrium are considered rare-earth elements because they tend to occur in the same ore deposits as the lanthanides and exhibit similar chemical properties. A broader definition that includes actinides may be used, since the actinides share some mineralogical and physical characteristics; the 17 rare-earth elements are cerium, erbium, gadolinium, lanthanum, neodymium, promethium, scandium, thulium and yttrium. Despite their name, rare-earth elements are – with the exception of the radioactive promethium – plentiful in Earth's crust, with cerium being the 25th most abundant element at 68 parts per million, more abundant than copper. However, because of their geochemical properties, rare-earth elements are dispersed and not found concentrated in rare-earth minerals; the first rare-earth mineral discovered was gadolinite, a mineral composed of cerium, iron and other elements.
This mineral was extracted from a mine in the village of Ytterby in Sweden. A table listing the 17 rare-earth elements, their atomic number and symbol, the etymology of their names, their main usages is provided here; some of the rare-earth elements are named after the scientists who discovered or elucidated their elemental properties, some after their geographical discovery. The following abbreviations are used: RE = rare earth REM = rare-earth metals REE = rare-earth elements REO = rare-earth oxides REY = rare-earth elements and yttrium LREE = light rare-earth elements HREE = heavy rare-earth elements The first rare-earth element discovered was the black mineral "ytterbite", it was discovered by Lieutenant Carl Axel Arrhenius in 1787 at a quarry in the village of Ytterby, Sweden. Arrhenius's "ytterbite" reached Johan Gadolin, a Royal Academy of Turku professor, his analysis yielded an unknown oxide that he called yttria. Anders Gustav Ekeberg isolated beryllium from the gadolinite but failed to recognize other elements that the ore contained.
After this discovery in 1794 a mineral from Bastnäs near Riddarhyttan, believed to be an iron–tungsten mineral, was re-examined by Jöns Jacob Berzelius and Wilhelm Hisinger. In 1803 they called it ceria. Martin Heinrich Klaproth independently called it ochroia, thus by 1803 there were two known rare-earth elements and cerium, although it took another 30 years for researchers to determine that other elements were contained in the two ores ceria and yttria. In 1839 Carl Gustav Mosander, an assistant of Berzelius, separated ceria by heating the nitrate and dissolving the product in nitric acid, he called the oxide of the soluble salt lanthana. It took him three more years to separate the lanthana further into pure lanthana. Didymia, although not further separable by Mosander's techniques, was a mixture of oxides. In 1842 Mosander separated the yttria into three oxides: pure yttria and erbia; the earth giving pink salts he called terbium. So in 1842 the number of known rare-earth elements had reached six: yttrium, lanthanum, didymium and terbium.
Nils Johan Berlin and Marc Delafontaine tried to separate the crude yttria and found the same substances that Mosander obtained, but Berlin named the substance giving pink salts erbium, Delafontaine named the substance with the yellow peroxide terbium. This confusion led to several false claims of new elements, such as the mosandrium of J. Lawrence Smith, or the philippium and decipium of Delafontaine. Due to the difficulty in separating the metals, the total number of false discoveries was dozens, with some putting the total number of discoveries at over a hundred. There were no further discoveries for 30 years, the element didymium was listed in the periodic table of elements with a molecular mass of 138. In 1879 Delafontaine used the new physical process of optical flame spectroscopy and found several new spectral lines in didymia. In 1879, the new element samarium was isolated by Paul Émile Lecoq de Boisbaudran from the mineral samarskite; the samaria earth was further separated by Lecoq de Boisbaudran in 1886, a similar result was obtained by Jean Charles Galissard de Marignac by direct isolation from samarskite.
They named the element gadolinium after Johan Gadolin, its oxide was named "gadolinia". Further spectroscopic analysis between 1886 and 1901 of samaria and samarskite by William Crookes, Lecoq de Boisbaudran and Eugène-Anatole Demarçay yielded several new spectroscopic lines that indicated the existence of an unknown element; the fractional crystallization of the oxides yielded europium in 1901. In 1839 the third source for rare earths became available; this is a mineral similar to uranotantalum. This mineral from Miass in the southern Ural Mountains was documented by Gustav Rose; the Russian chemist R. Harmann proposed that a new eleme
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Marignac, Jean Charles Galissard de". Encyclopædia Britannica. 17 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 716.
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the 