Facts about Zirconium
Zirconium (Arabic zarkыn, from Persian zargыn ?????, meaning "gold like") was discovered in 1789 by Martin Heinrich Klaproth and isolated in 1824 by Jцns Jakob Berzelius.
Zirconium is also used in corrosion-resistant piping, heat exchangers, and lamp filaments.
The crystal bar process (or Iodide process), developed by Anton Eduard van Arkel and Jan Hendrik de Boer in 1925, was the first industrial process for the commercial production of pure, ductile, metallic zirconium.
Zirconium and hafnium are contained in zircon at a ratio of about 50 to 1 and are difficult to separate.
Commercial zirconium naturally contains 1-5 percent of hafnium, and it is extremely difficult to separate these two elements from each other.
An alloy of zirconium and zinc becomes magnetic at temperatures below 35 K. The oxidation state of zirconium is usually +4, although it may also occur in oxidation states of +3 and +2.
Zirconium is a transition metal that is located in period 5 of the periodic table, between yttrium and niobium.
The zirconium is used mostly almost pure, in the form of low alloys, most often from the zircaloy group.
The principal economic source of zirconium is the mineral zircon (zirconium silicate, ZrSiO4), deposits of which are located in Australia, Brazil, India, Russia, and the United States.
The resulting reactor-grade zirconium is about ten times as expensive as the hafnium-contaminated commercial grade.
Naturally occurring zirconium is composed of four stable isotopes: 90Zr, 91Zr, 92Zr, and 94Zr.
Zirconium (chemical symbol Zr, atomic number 40) is a strong, lustrous, gray-white metal that resembles titanium.
Zirconium is also in 30 other recognized mineral species including baddeleyite.
In "advanced" (Caenophidian) snakes, the broad belly scales and rows of dorsal scales correspond to the vertebrae, allowing scientists to count the vertebrae without dissection.
The metal was isolated in an impure form by Berzelius, who heated a mixture of potassium and potassium zirconium fluoride in a small decomposition process conducted in an iron tube.
Nonetheless, for applications in nuclear reactors (see below), zirconium needs to be prepared free of hafnium contamination.