Hafnium (new) - Periodic Table of Videos

Brady asked me about hafnium and it turns out it's far more exciting than I thought it burns really well it has a great back story it has strange links to mobile phones and to nuclear reactors and it's very expensive what more could Brady want hafnium is element 72 on the periodic table it's on the same group as titanium and zirconium and hefnim is underneath that turns out to be a really important fact in its Discovery 2023 is a really important year for hafnium because it was discovered at least that the paper announcing its Discovery was published on the 20th of January 1923 so it's just over 100 years old it wasn't isolated immediately but that's when its existence was proved that paper gave rise to one of the biggest rows in science at the beginning of the 20th century I inquired about hafnim to our friend Tony lippman he said it's a really hot metal everyone wants some but we on periodic table of videos are his friends so he'd find some for us and it arrived by post a few days ago two samples one a nice packet with two pieces of very shiny metal and the other one with a much larger lump but which had interesting features almost crystallites in it Neil was very excited but it turns out that it's really tough Neil tried to straighten it with his hands he was defeated so he needed to use a hammer I'd never seen metallic caffeine and I didn't know much about it and I read that it didn't dissolve in acids easily but I thought there's a challenge for Neil so Neil got out his fuming nitric acid which he believes dissolves everything [Music] but hafnim was completely Untouched by it these nitric acid has met its match and we tried another acid concentrated hydrochloric acid still nothing but Neil would not be defeated so he brought out the aqua regia which dissolves gold aqua regia is a mixture of HCL hydrochloric acid and concentrated nitric acid and they react together to make a much more corrosive solution and hafnium much to Neil's pleasure began to react that was a bit slow and Neil said even gold reacts faster with aqua regia and being Neil he produced a small piece of gold and we ran them in competition the gold was a bit slow getting started but by the time that Neil and Brady were packing up it had largely dissolved and the hafnium was still there sometime later this is the golden Avenue is foreign so let me explain about its Discovery even Mendeleev thought that there should be another element on the periodic table where hapnium is but everything was confused by the discovery of the rare Earths there was some discussion would happen be the last of the rare Earths or would it be the first of the next row of transition metals the transition metals are the metals that go across the periodic table from left to right and so the French chemist orbang the one who discovered luticium thought that he would look among the rare Earths and before the first world war he thought he discovered elements 72 which he gave the name celtium or it may be calcium from like the English word Celtic c-e-l-t ium then it turned out that it made a mistake so when he and the colleague published again after the first world war in 1922 people didn't really want to believe him he was The Boy Who Cried Wolf precisely and then in 1923 a Hungarian chemist working in Denmark called the hevicy together with the Dutch colleague Costa published the paper in the journal Nature which described their discovery of element 72 and the paper is quite interesting because first of all the editor writes that he takes no responsibility for the content of the paper whether it's right or wrong and secondly it was published very quickly and is very short like most of these papers announcing discoveries of new elements and because they were working in Denmark in Copenhagen they've decided to call it hafnium from the Latin word or what they believed was the Latin name of Copenhagen which is half Neil I don't know it's a Latin name that is like Hefner where did celtium come from why did the other guy want Celtic it's because the original had inhabitants of France were Celts in English there were Celts I suspect in French they would be called celt they were both rather patriotic names and the French were really against the paper from Denmark because they have seen who was the lead author had fought on the Austrian side in the first world war and it was only five years after the end of the war so it was nerves were a bit Raw oh hafnim was supported by Niels Bohr the very famous physicist and celtium was supported by Ernest Rutherford and so they were both trying behind the scenes to bend the ear of the editor of nature whose reputed to have allowed ball to read the proofs of the French papers before they were published I think nowadays after 100 years we can say it was all a bit dodgy eventually hafnium triumphed I think it's a better name because celtium is really a bit like cerium and probably would confuse generations of students now the real reason that they were successful is the pair in Denmark realized that hafnim was in the zirconium group so they were looking in zirconium minerals you can see here it's a couple of nice samples of zirconium metal also from Anthony and hafnim is found as an impurity in um zirconium when you isolate it from the minerals the French team because they thought it was a rare earth we're looking at the minerals from Italy and places like that where there are tiny traces of hafnium but it's enormously more difficult to find it so all the signals in their Spectrum were very weak so there's quite a good moral for you if you're going to look for an element look at the periodic table first so you know where to look now we come to the most exciting part that Neil discovered Neil took his file and started making finely divided filings of hafnium Neil as you know is not a small guy and he found it really quite hard to abrade much of it of the piece of Hefner they didn't trust my shaking hands to hold it so Connor a rather technician came to hold the paper and when Neil sprinkled the hafnium dust into the Bunsen flame it burned to make presumably the oxide it was really quite artistic wow that's that's impressive there's a lot going on there Brady who had been a little bored up till this point started getting really excited and the big smile spread upon Neil's face and this demonstrates the other thing I read which that's high temperature happening Burns but only when it's very finally divided Brady who thinks about the periodic table probably more than the rest of us pointed out that he wasn't very surprised that tafnian burnt well because zirconium Burns quite nicely as well if you watch as zirconium video you will see similar Flames when we draw Sparks when we drop in the zirconium my personal feeling is that hafnim was a little bit better because it's denser and therefore it falls better into the flame because the flame you imagine is very turbulent with the burning and so it's easy for the particles to be knocked out it's up to you to judge this brings us to why we have hafnium at all because until very recently it hasn't had many uses it has a very high melting point apparently it was used in the nozzles for the Rocket motors on the lunar lander on the Apollo mission two [Applause] unfortunately it also has a disadvantage that it absorbs neutrons and therefore it is a very bad impurity to have in nuclear reactors this matters because zirconium is used for cladding the fuel rods in a nuclear reactor so the hafnium that we have is a byproduct of the zirconium industry for the nuclear power plants so without nuclear power plants we probably wouldn't have much production of hafanim at all so basically when they're producing the pure zirconium they have to get all the hafney amount yes but now it is suddenly become really important material because in electronics as you probably know transistors which are at the heart of whatever computer or phone that you're watching this on the transistors get smaller and smaller and smaller and as they get smaller you need more specialized materials to act as insulators and hafnium oxides turn out to be very good for making computer chips really high Purity and this is now where most of the hafnium from the nuclear industry is going and there's another really exciting development if you have a smartphone and most people do now you probably don't realize that inside the screen that's just under the glass there is an electrically conducting layer which is transparent so that you can see the display and at the moment most phones use indium but indium is getting scarce and it is now being realized that perhaps it could be replaced by hafnium or compound of hefnim I'm not sure if I've ever shown you a patent but this is a recent one from the Korean company Samsung patents and legal documents they're usually very boring to read but you can see from the title this talks about transparent screens and at the back of the patent they're the claims where they claim what their new invention can do and you can see there's a whole list of claims some of which involve screens so it may well be that your future phones will have hafnium in them you can support our videos and have your name appear on our Periodic Table of patrons there's a link to our patreon in the video description where you can find out more and last time I checked no one's put their name on hafnium yet you could be the first and there's an equilibrium someone coming off an equal number are going back on to the surface so if you just have the gold in there it appears to be unaffected if you were on an atomic scale you'd see atoms coming off and others going back

Channel: Periodic Videos

Views: 248,760

Keywords: periodic, videos, chemistry

Id: Qb9f5uBKJhg

Length: 14min 35sec (875 seconds)

Published: Fri May 12 2023