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Hafnium Indium

2011 anno internazionale della chimica

I lettori che “battono” con le dita sulla tastiera di un computer ed esigono che sullo schermo appaia quello che si vuole, un testo, una figura, un film, those who are enchanted by the proposals, more often, computers cheaper and always faster, usually do not think that efficiency and speed depend on small straterelli of special materials, chips, in which are stored results of continuous research and improvements not only in electronics, but also their own materials.

We talk about the "society of silicon, but silicon is only one component and often not the most important of chips. Refinements of semiconductors (which are the soul of chips) have been made with a metal little known but very important, hafnium. Its existence was been advocated by the great Russian chemist Mendeleev (1834-1907): the "write" in 1869, his periodic table of chemical elements, arranged in order of increasing importance and similarity of behavior, he saw that there was a "hole" Section 72, which was below the element zirconium, which deals with the box number 40. He should be an element with similar behavior to that of zirconium, but Mendeleev believed that the empty seat was occupied by lanthanum.

Only in 1923, the Danish chemist Dirk Coster (1889-1950) and Hungarian chemist Georg von Hevesy (1885-1966, Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1943) were able to isolate some of the mineral zircon a metal that had properties similar to those of the element missing from the box 72 and the hafnium named after the Latin name of the Danish capital, Copenhagen.

The metal is produced as a by-product of zirconium, with considerable difficulty because of the similarity of the two elements. Hafnium has already had applications in the nuclear industry for slowing down the neutrons and some other industrial uses; carbide, hafnium carbide is the higher melting temperature, hafnium alloys are extremely resistant to corrosion. Do not know the world production of this metal, mainly concentrated in Australia, South Africa and China. Some statistics news and merchandise are available at the U.S. Geological Survey USGS here.

is to be expected that the discovery of new super-fast chip-based semiconductor containing silicate and hafnium oxide, upon increasing the demand for and production and have already started mining of mineral zircon, which contain from one to 5% of hafnium, in Madagascar, Mozambique and other African countries.