It is expected that scandium-aluminum alloys will be important in the manufacture of fuel cells. Scientists have only studied a few compounds of scandium. About 20 kilograms 44 pounds of scandium oxide Sc 2 O 3 , also known as scandia, are used each year in the United States in the production of high intensity lights.
Scandium iodide ScI 3 is added to mercury vapor lamps so that they will emit light that closely resembles sunlight. Estimated Crustal Abundance : 2. Number of Stable Isotopes : 1 View all isotope data. Electron Shell Configuration :. Scandium Previous Isotopes Next. Named for Scandinavia. Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev, inventor of the periodic table, predicted the existence and properties of scandium which he called "ekaboron" — similar to boron in , according to the New World Encyclopedia.
Lars Fredrick Nilson, a Swedish chemist, when examining the spectra of the minerals euxenite and gadolinite, discovered the element in The element was named for the Latin word for Scandinavia, "Scandia," due to the minerals in which scandium was at that time found to exist only in the Scandinavian Peninsula, according to Peter van der Krogt , a Dutch historian.
Per Teodor Cleve, a Swedish chemist, made the link that the new element discovered by Nilson was the same as the proposed element described by Mendeleev. In the first attempt to isolate scandium, Nilson and his team processed 10 kilograms of euxenite and were able to produce about two grams of scandium oxide. In , 99 percent pure scandium was produced. The majority of research involving scandium is the use of scandium alloys, particularly with aluminum.
Most of these studies discuss the benefits of combining scandium with other metals and what alloys will possibly be used for. There are new methods in working with the alloys, such as a patent filed in by William Tack, an American inventor, and continuing studies on recovering scandium from various resources, such as this study by Weiwei Wang et al.
Tack's patent described a method for using aluminum-scandium alloys to assemble structures such as bicycle frames by use of welding. The alloys that were used contained various amounts of scandium along with other "fillers" including silicon, manganese, magnesium, zirconium, titanium, and copper to determine the best combination of materials for various structures using the author's welding technique.
The study described several processes for the recovery of scandium from several resources. Scandium is primarily recovered as a by-product of mining other ores such as uranium, aluminum, titanium, zirconium, and other rare-earth ores. Various techniques are used to recover the scandium in the left over ores including leaching , solvent extraction , precipitation , and calcination.
0コメント