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- Did you know that the element we mine is used in phones?
- Yeah, but I'm talking about Yttrium. it's inbastnasite, ferusonite, monazite, samarskite and xenotime, they're all mined in USA, China, Australia, India and Brazil
- Well I figured that at least one of them had to, we mine a lot of stuff.
- Once it's been mined one method of getting the yttrium from the mixed oxide ores is to dissolve it in sulfuric acid and then fractionate it by ion exchange chromatography, which is just exploiting the interaction between charged molecules in a sample and oppositely charged moieties in the stationery phase of the chromatography matrix.
- Well it's not a free element, meaning it's always in another ore or rare-earth mineral.
- Well how is it extracted?
- When the counter-ion is nitrate, the light lanthanides are removed, and when the counter-ion is thiocyanate, the heavy lanthanides are removed. In this way, yttrium salts of 99.999% purity are obtained. In the usual situation, where yttrium is in a mixture that is two-thirds heavy-lanthanide, yttrium should be removed as soon as possible to facilitate the separation of the remaining elements.
- Oh, just wait. There's more. With the addition of oxalic acid, the yttrium oxalate precipitates. The oxalate is converted into the oxide by heating under oxygen. By reacting the resulting yttrium oxide with hydrogen fluoride, yttrium fluoride is obtained.
- When quaternary ammonium salts are used as extractants, most yttrium will remain in the aqueous phase (that means the homogeneous part of a heterogeneous system that consists of water or a solution in water of a substance.).
- That sounds complicated.
- Honestly, I don't know, and when I tried to research it I couldn't find anything.
- This hurts my head, but what happens to the other elements that get extracted in the process?
- LED's, just like the ones in your phone.
- Ok, one more question, what's it used for?
- Daryl (Co-worker)
- So now you know about Yttrium!
- Thanks Daryl.
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