Did you know that rhodium is the rarest of all precious metals? It was discovered in 1803 in London by English chemist William Hyde Wollaston. He obtained the metal from an original sample of platinum ore in South America. The product was a dark red powder that Wollaston treated with hydrogen gas in order to get what we now call rhodium. The element name is derived from the Greek word Rhodon, which means rose-colored (Thomas Jefferson NAF).
First, rhodium is one of the platinum group metals along with the other elements ruthenium, palladium, osmium, iridium, and platinum. It is considered a member of the transition metals family and is generally classified as a metal. On the periodic table it is located in group nine, period five (Thomas Jefferson NAF).
Now, this rare element has many interesting attributes that are unlike other elements. Rhodium is a silver and white metallic color with
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much luster. The hard, odorless solid is extremely reflective and resists corrosion. With a normal boiling point of 3695 degrees celsius and melting point of 1963 degrees celsius, rhodium is highly conductive. It has an electrical conductivity of 38 percent and a thermal of 150 W/mxK. Heat and electricity pass through rhodium ease, as it is the most electrically conductive element of the platinum group. This is a sample of what rhodium metal looks like: However, it has poor malleability and ductility, as it is complicated to form intro strip and wire.
Its hardness is as follows: Mohs- 6.0, Vickers (MPa) 1100-8000, and Brinell (MPa) 980-1350. Lastly, the element has a density of 12.4 grams per cubic centimeter (Rhodium Element Facts).
Additionally, the nuclear and chemical properties of rhodium are quite unique. The only significant natural isotope is 103Rh. It has a mass number of 103, a natural abundance of 100 percent, and is stable. This element has no important man-made isotopes.
Furthermore, rhodium is a relatively inactive metal. It has no reaction with water and no found reactions with bases or acids. In regards to its reactivity with air, rhodium is greatly immune to atmospheric attack. Heating it with oxygen at 600 degrees celsius, it produces rhodium oxide. As for the halogens, rhodium only reacts directly with fluorine gas to form a highly corrosive rhodium fluoride. Rhodium’s inactivity makes it a harmless element ("Rhodium: The
Essentials"). Although rhodium is such a rare metal, its role in society is more important than you may think. The only places in the entire world where this precious metal can be found is in the river sands of North and South America, and sometimes in copper-nickel sulfide ores in the Sudbury region of Ontario, Canada. To obtain pure rhodium, other metals located in the source must be removed by precipitation. It is then used commercially to make products such electrical contracts, jewelry, and catalytic converters. Yet, the most common use for rhodium is being an alloying agent with platinum and palladium to produce furnace coils, electrodes for aircraft spark plugs, and laboratory crucibles ("RHODIUM"). The process of isolating rhodium into its pure self for the purpose of commercial use is incredibly long and complex. The extraction process involves preliminary treatment of the ore it was found in or the metal byproduct. The resulting residue is then melted with the use of sodium bisulphate, and the mixture extracts water. This gives a solution of rhodium sulphate which is precipitated out with hydroxide and sodium hydroxide. It is dissolved again in hydrochloric acid and treated with Na2No2 and NH4Cl to form a precipitate of rhodium complex. The dissolution of the precipitate in the HCI provides a pure solution. After evaporation to the dryness and burning under the hydrogen gas creates pure rhodium (Rhodium: The Essentials). As for the supply and demand aspect of rhodium, the current situation is working well. Because there are only ten mines in the world that are able to produce it, it cannot keep up with radical changes in demand rate easily. Luckily, the demand for rhodium does not inflate and deflate drastically or suddenly, and the price is driven by supply factors. In fact, there just so happens to be a surplus supply of rhodium in 2015, which has made the price of the metal fall. As well as the price, the global demand for rhodium has fallen as the economy has weakened. As the economy suffers, so does the demand for vehicles, and consequently as does the need for rhodium used in catalytic converters. The pure cost of this precious metal is $13,000 per 100 grams, and the bulk cost is $7,000 per 100 grams. Rhodium is available for sale commercially despite its unusual rarity (MiningFeeds). After an excessive amount of careful and thorough research, I find it evident that the element of rhodium is an undeniable benefit to our society today. Because it is able to unproblematically keep up with supply and demand rates, there is plenty of it for what it is being used for. Without this certain kind of metal, we wouldn’t have as beautiful of jewelry, as efficient of automotive parts, or the same alloys for little parts of electrical products. As it is a harmless substance with desirable color and industrious use, I find it undoubtedly that rhodium is a beneficial element to our society.
In chapter 8 titled "Radium (Ra)" of The Poisoner's Handbook by Deborah Blum, the most interesting story developed within this chapter was the death of dial workers at Orange, New Jersey after been exposed to radium every day. It was interesting due to the fact that radium was used everywhere in the community and was never thought it could harm anyone. Radium was a super element that was used everywhere, but its continuous use unmasked its fatal habits. As it was stated in the text, "Radiant health, the ads proclaimed-beautiful skin, endless vigor, and eternal health—ingesting radium seemed the next best thing to drinking sunlight." (Blum 179). People were accepting radium as a natural gold element but they haven't realized constant contact
The Radium Luminous Material Corporation was founded in 1914 (renamed in 1921 to the United States Radium Corporation) by Dr. Sabin Arnold von Sochocky and Dr. George S. Willis becoming the first U.S. company to produce radioluminescent paint. The paint used by this particular company was the trademarked "Undark", invented by William J. Hammer through mixing radium, zinc sulfide and glue with the help from Marie and Pierre Currie and Henri Becquerel. The corporation hired hundreds of women having no trouble finding employees, being one of the few companies at the time to hire women. Business was surging with the defense contract obtained by filling the demand during World War I by making equipment for soldiers luminescent, enabling reading at night. The company even marketed other i...
Isotopes refer to 1 of 2 or more atoms with the same atomic number but different numbers of neutrons. The atom copper has two stable isotopes. They are 63Cu and 65Cu. 63Cu has an isotope atomic mass (in amu) of 62.9295989 and a natural abundance (in atom %) of 69.17. 65Cu has an isotope atomic mass (in amu) of 64.9277929 and a natural abundance (in atom %) of 30.83. The averag...
Strontium was discovered by Adair Crawford, an Irish chemist, in 1790 while studying the mineral witherite (BaCO3). When he mixed witherite with hydrochloric acid (HCl), he did not get the results he expected. He assumed that his sample of witherite was contaminated with an unknown mineral, a mineral he named strontianite (SrCO3). Strontium was first isolated by Sir Humphry Davy, an English chemist, in 1808 through the electrolysis of a mixture of strontium chloride (SrCl2) and mercuric oxide (HgO). Strontium reacts vigorously with water and quickly tarnishes in air, so it must be stored out of contact with air and water. Due to its extreme reactivity to air, this element always naturally occurs combined with other elements and compounds. Strontium is very
Molybdenum is a transition metal. It is represented by the symbol Mo. It is a pure metal that is is silverish white in color and very hard, and has one of the highest melting points of all pure elements at 4753 °F. Its boiling point is 8382 °F. Its density is 10280 kg/m3 and its hardness is 5.5.
The Beryllium element, an alkaline earth metal which belongs to group II of the periodic table, was first discovered in 1798 by L.M. Vauquelin. Vauquelin,a French chemist, was doing work with aluminum and noticed a white powder that was nothing like that of aluminum or any of its derivatives. Vauquelin named this mystery powder, gluinium because of its sweet taste was like that of glucose. In 1828, Wohler, a German metallurgist reduced it to its metallic form and renamed it beryllium.(figure 2)
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Radon gas was found in the 1870s, when some scientists were mining for ore in Ore Mountains in Schneeberg, Saxony. The area has a high content of radon in the tunnels because the area has been mined since the 1470s. The scientists later discovered that 75% of the miners died from lung cancer but it did not shut down the tunnels until 1950.
Uranium, a radioactive element, was first mined in the western United States in 1871 by Dr. Richard Pierce, who shipped 200 pounds of pitchblende to London from the Central City Mining District. This element is sorta boring but I found something interesting, they used it to make an an atomic bomb in the Cold War. In 1898 Pierre and Marie Curie and G. Bemont isolated the "miracle element" radium from pitchblende. That same year, uranium, vanadium and radium were found to exist in carnotite, a mineral containing colorful red and yellow ores that had been used as body paint by early Navajo and Ute Indians on the Colorado Plateau. The discovery triggered a small prospecting boom in southeastern Utah, and radium mines in Grand and San Juan counties became a major source of ore for the Curies. It was not the Curies but a British team working in Canada which was the first to understand that the presence of polonium and radium in pitchblende was not due to simple geological and mineral reasons, but that these elements were directly linked to uranium by a process of natural radioactive transmutation. The theory of radioactive transformation of elements was brilliantly enlarge in1901 by the New Zealand physicist Ernest Rutherford and the English chemist Frederick Soddy at McGill University in Montreal. At dusk on the evening of November 8, 1895, Wilhelm Rontgen, professor of physics at the University of Wurzburg in Germany, noticed a cathode tube that a sheet of paper come distance away. He put his hand between the tube and the paper, he saw the image of the bones in his hand on the paper.
The element neon was discovered by Morris Travers and Sir William Ramsey. The chemists first isolated neon in 1898 by evaporating argon using low pressure. Neon was the third noble gas discovered by Ramsay and Travers, after argon and krypton. Neon has an atomic number of 10. The first neon lamp was produced by Georges Claude. Neon produces a reddish-orange color. Argon produces a faint purple. Neon most commonly used in advertising signs. Neon creates light through the application of electricity to neon in a glass tube.
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