Hello everyone Today I will tell you about the metal that can replace Gold about Niobium In the Periodic Table of Chemical Elements Niobium is placed in the 5th group between Vanadium and Tantalum It got its name in the honor of Niobe, the daughter of the ancient Greek King Tantalus And this is not a coincidence because the properties of Niobium and Tantalum are very similar and at first sight they are quite hard to distinguish Niobium is mined from the mineral Columbite where Tantalum is also present Because of that, until 1949 in the US Niobium was also called Columbium as in the 19th century American scientists sometimes considered Tantalum and Niobium the same element Now, when obtaining Niobium from ore, it's purified from Tantalum and other metals and so pure Niobium Pentoxide is acquired which is then consequently dissolved in Hydrofluoric acid thereby obtaining complex Niobium compounds, which are then reduced by metallic Sodium to metallic state After such a process, what is obtained is high purity Niobium If you compare its appearance with Tantalum then you can immediately see the difference in that Tantalum has a more shiny surface, though it might be just the way they produce these rods Also Niobium is about three times cheaper than Tantalum Due to its high plasticity, it's easy to make a Niobium foil which is much harder to distinguish from the foil of Tantalum although there is one way As the density of Niobium is almost two times less than that of Tantalum therefore these metals can be easily distinguished by means of scales Also, the melting temperature point of Niobium is 250°C less than that of Tantalum meaning that my gas torch will never melt this Niobium rod The only thing that the burning managed to achieve is it slightly oxidized the surface of the metal since, with strong heating Niobium can react with Oxygen in the air forming Nb₂O₅ Due to its high melting point and relative chemical resistance one of the first commercial applications it had was as a filament in old bulbs but later on it was replaced with Tungsten In dilute acids Niobium does not dissolve at all However, under the influence of electricity this metal behaves more interestingly Like Tantalum, Niobium can be easily anodized in other words, its surface can be colored in many ways by controlling the thickness of the oxide film on the surface of the metal This is what I indeed decided to do, using my new voltage converter which from 30 Volts makes an adjustable DC voltage up to 120 Volts and even has a screen for convenience In my opinion this is a very convenient solution as commercial anodizing devices cost around $200 Similar to how I did this with Tantalum I first decided to anodize Niobium in a solution of table salt of about 10% concentration I connected Niobium to the anode, that is to the positive of the current source and as the cathode I used a Tantalum anodized plate Though, when anodizing in a solution of table salt Niobium behaved quite badly First a brown oxide film appeared, but beyond that nothing interesting happened When the voltage increased, the metal simply began to dissolve Apparently the Chloride ions, for Niobium, are much more aggressive than for Tantalum I started to think that maybe I accidentally broke my source of current It doesn't seem so It works just fine Then I realized it is most probably a matter of choosing the electrolyte and went for answers to the almighty internet And guess what I found? A bunch of links to online shops for buying kits to anodize Tantalum and Niobium And just one American forum when one of the users mentions soda and Sodium Tetraborate Though on YouTube of course, there are a lot of videos where a man takes a powder called TSP... TSP-PF If you decipher TSP, it means Triphosphate though, the packaging mentions that it has no phosphates Wat is happening? As a result, this substance remains foolishly incredible Commerce in all its glory! Okay, I thought, maybe there are some scientific articles on this topic Of course there is even a fresh one by Japanese year 216 But, as always, cunning business people demand a coin for science The article has a price tag After several unsuccessful attempts, I finally made a more or less working electrolyte which is a solution of Sodium Tetraborate, or simply "Borax" Concentration here is about 2 grams per 100 milliliters Apart from Borax, solution of an ordinary soda is also suitable By the way, while I was experimenting with different electrolytes, I found one interesting effe ct In the solution of Sodium Phosphate at a voltage of 110 Volts the Niobium plate began to be wildly proto-anodized with a spark discharge Sparks ran on the surface of the metal leaving behind a gray trace of oxidized metal It looks very fascinating Eventually, after a series of failures, Niobium succumbed and began to shine in different colors depending on the voltage applied And the higher it was, the more interesting the colors became This footage shows how the colors of anodized Niobium vary with different voltage When the voltage reaches 120 Volts, we get a beautiful light green color It is also interesting that the color of anodized Niobium depends on the lighting because the film covering the metal is very thin The color change happens due to the different thickness of the Niobium Oxide film on the surface of the metal and the color we see is based on the [interference of] applied light reflected from the metal and light that has passed through the oxide layer As a result, I have obtained several pieces of colored Niobium But this seemed to be as not enough So I decided to do something more beautiful and worthwhile I printed a vector DNA model on a printer made it embossed with the help of a good old hammer, and cut it out As a result, I now have a Niobium billet which can be given almost any color I decided to make it blue The voltage here is about 35 Volts After that, I pulled it out of the solution, took a brush and soaked it with Borax solution and began to paint with it on the metal I can tell you that it looks very fascinating The only problem here is that when the voltage is high the electrolyte boils and the patterns may not turn out to be clear As the result, I have come out of this with a beautiful trinket from Niobium In my opinion, as first attempt it's not so bad However, it doesn't really look like Gold here so I made another one and anodized it to the gold color at voltage of 60 Volts After that I increased the voltage to 95 Volts and made some beautiful blue dots The second trinket looked much more presentable than the first one I think that if you don't have money for the expensive Gold or diamonds you can safely use anodized Niobium or Tantalum it depends of your taste In the Year 2003 Austria even issued commemorative coins of €25 the core of which consisted of anodized Niobium They liked this unusual color of the metal However, nowadays, in addition to those aesthetic applications Niobium in its pure form is almost often used to create super-powerful magnetic fields since at 9.2 Kelvin pure Niobium acquires the properties of a superconductor that is, it loses absolutely all internal resistance If we cool Niobium with liquid Helium then it actually becomes a superconductor Because of this, this metal was the first of the metals that was used as a high-temperature superconductor Such properties of Niobium are now used in MRI scanners and for the cooling of quantum computers The Large Hadron Collider uses about 600 tonnes of Niobium and Tin alloy cables and in the future they plan to install superconducting radio-frequency resonators from pure Niobium However, still 90% of Niobium produced at the moment goes into the production of super-alloys which have some unique mechanical properties and are resistant to deformation and corrosion under strong heating Such alloys are used in cosmonautics for the production of rocket engine nozzles and in jet engine designs In the end we can say that Niobium is a very useful and amazing metal capable of easily disguising itself as Gold so that you cannot tell as well as participating in scientific discoveries in the Hadron Collider For the provided Niobium for the experiments, I will thank the company SAmaterials.com I will put a link to their site in the video description =^.^=
