How Much Do You Know About Tantalum?
Tantalum is the third refractory metal after tungsten and rhenium. Tantalum has a series of excellent properties such as high melting point, low vapor pressure, good cold working performance, high chemical stability, strong resistance to liquid metal corrosion, and large dielectric constant of surface oxide film. It has important applications in high-tech fields such as atomic energy, superconducting technology, automotive electronics, aerospace, medical care and scientific research. At present, the main application of tantalum is tantalum capacitors.
How tantalum was discovered
In the mid-17th century, a heavy black mineral found in North America was sent to the British Museum for safekeeping. After about 150 years, until 1801, the British chemist Charles Hatchet accepted the task of analyzing this ore in the British Museum, and discovered a new element from it and named it columbium (later renamed it). niobium).
In 1802, when the Swedish chemist Anders Gustav Ekberg analyzed a mineral (niobium-tantalum ore) in Scandinavia, after making their acid into a fluorinated double salt, After recrystallization, a new element was discovered, which he named Tantalum-tantalum in reference to the name of Tantalus, the son of the god Zeus in Greek mythology.
Although tantalum was discovered in the early 19th century, the metal tantalum was not produced until 1903, and industrial production of tantalum began in 1922. Therefore,.. the development of the tantalum industry began in the 1920s, and the Chinese tantalum industry began in 1956.
The United States is the first to produce tantalum. In 1922, it began to produce metal tantalum on an industrial scale. Japan and other capitalists.. both developed the tantalum industry from the late 1950s or early 1960s. After decades of development, the industrial production of tantalum has reached a very high level. Since the 1990s, the relatively large-scale tantalum product manufacturers have included three major groups: Cabot Group in the United States, HCST Group in Germany, and Ningxia Dongfang Tantalum Industry Co., Ltd. in China. The tantalum products produced by these three groups account for 80% of the total. %above. The products, process technology and equipment of foreign tantalum industry are generally at a high level, which meets the needs of the rapid development of science and technology.
The development of China's tantalum industry faces certain problems. If raw materials are in short supply, resource reserves are scarce. The proven tantalum resources in China are characterized by scattered ore veins, complex mineral composition, low Ta2O5 grade in raw ore, fine mineral embedded granularity, and few economic resources, so it is difficult to build large-scale mines. Although large-scale tantalum-niobium mines have also been discovered in recent years, the detailed geological conditions, mineral conditions and economic evaluations are not clear. Therefore, the supply of primary tantalum raw materials in China is very problematic.
China's tantalum industry is also faced with another problem, that is, the lack of high-tech product development capabilities. It is undeniable that although China's tantalum industry technology and equipment have been greatly developed, and it has the production capacity to produce a full range of tantalum products in batches, there is excess capacity in the middle and low grades. Products such as high specific volume high pressure tantalum powder and tantalum for semiconductors The embarrassing situation of insufficient production capacity such as targets is difficult to reverse. Due to the small amount of domestic high-tech industries and insufficient driving force, the development of high-tech products in China's tantalum industry has been affected. From an enterprise perspective, the development of the tantalum industry lacks guidance and regulation. In recent years, tantalum smelting and processing enterprises have rapidly grown from 5 at the beginning to 20, and the duplication of construction is very serious, and the excess production capacity is very prominent.
In the years of tantalum operation, Chinese tantalum enterprises have improved their craftsmanship and equipment, and improved the scale, variety and quality of their products, and have entered the ranks of the largest countries in the production and application of tantalum industry. As long as the problem of raw materials, the industrialization of high-tech products and the problem of industrial restructuring are further solved, China's tantalum industry will definitely enter the ranks of powerful countries.
