Scandium is a chemical element with symbol Sc and atomic number 2 1. Elemental substance is a soft, silvery transition metal, which is often mixed with gadolinium and erbium. The yield is very small, and the content in the crust is about 0.0005%. Scandium is often used to make special glasses and light high temperature resistant alloys.
/kloc-In the late 9th century, the study of rare earth elements became a craze. One year before scandium was discovered, de Marignac of Switzerland obtained a white oxide different from erbium soil by partially decomposing nitrate in rose red erbium soil. He named this oxide ytterbium soil, which is the sixth discovery of rare earth elements.
L.F. Nilson (1840 ~1899) of Uppsala University in Sweden purified erbium soil according to Malinak's method, and accurately measured the atomic weights of erbium and ytterbium (because he is now focusing on accurately measuring the physical and chemical constants of rare earth elements to verify the periodic laws of elements). After partial decomposition of 13, he got 3.5g pure ytterbium soil.
But at this time, something strange happened. Marinak gave the atomic weight of ytterbium as 172.5, while Nelson got only 167.46. Nelson is keenly aware that there may be some light elements in it.
So he continued to treat ytterbium soil with the same process, and finally when only one tenth of the sample was left, the measured atomic weight dropped to134.75; At the same time, some new absorption lines were found in the spectrum. Nelson named Scandium after his hometown Scandinavia.
1879 officially published the research results. He also mentioned many chemical properties of scandium salt and scandium soil in his paper. But in this paper, he did not give the exact atomic weight of scandium, nor did he determine the position of scandium in the element cycle.
Nelson's good friend Cliff (1840 ~ 1905) also teaches at Uppsala University, and he also did this work together. Starting from erbium soil, he excluded erbium soil as a large number of components, then separated ytterbium soil and scandium soil, and found two new rare earth elements, holmium and thulium, from the residue.
As a by-product, he purified scandium soil and further understood the physical and chemical properties of scandium. In this way, the drift bottle released by Mendeleev was finally fished up by Cliff after sleeping for ten years.
Scandium is a boron-like element predicted by Mendeleev. Their discovery once again proved the correctness of the periodic law of elements and Mendeleev's foresight.
In 1937, metallic scandium was produced from electrolytic molten scandium chloride.