Rhenium Facts
Rhenium Facts
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| Interesting Rhenium Facts: |
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| Mendeleev predicted an element with rhenium's characteristics when he designed his periodic table. |
| The credit for rhenium's discovery is typically awarded to Walter Noddack, Ida Tacke Noddack, and Otto Berg in 1925. |
| The trio named the element after the Rhine River in Germany. |
| Three years after discovering it in several different minerals and ores, the team extracted one gram of rhenium. |
| Rhenium was the last element to be discovered that had a stable isotope; other elements have been discovered since that time, but they are radioactive. |
| Re-185 is rhenium's only stable isotope. |
| Rhenium is only one of three elements to have a stable isotope that is less abundant than its radioisotope. |
| Rhenium's radioactive isotope has a half-life of around 100,000,000,000 years. |
| Rhenium has the highest boiling point of any of the elements. |
| Rhenium has the third highest melting point of any element. |
| Only tungsten and carbon have higher melting points. |
| It is also the fourth highest element in density. |
| Rhenium is one of the rarest elements found in the planet's crust. |
| Its abundance can only be estimated, and that amount is thought to be between one-half and one part per billion in the Earth's crust. |
| This make rhenium the seventy-seventh most common element. |
| The total global production of rhenium is only between forty and fifty tons per year, most of which is extracted from ores in Chile. |
| This level of rarity makes rhenium one of the most expensive metal elements, with some recent prices being as high as $4500US per kilogram. |
| Most rhenium is extracted from the refining of molybdenum or copper ores. |
| The single most common commercial use for rhenium is in the alloys that make up jet engines. |
| These alloys contain 6% rhenium, and are used to make the combustion chambers and other components of jets. |
| When rhenium is alloyed with nickel, the end result is considered a superalloy for its greatly increased creep strength. |
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