Brief Introduction to Rare Earths

Rare earths is a term commonly used to describe the 15 chemically similar, lanthanide elements which appear together towards the bottom of the Periodic Table. Two other elements, yttrium and scandium, which have similar chemical properties, are often also referred to as rare earths. Rare earths can be divided into "light" rare earths and "heavy" rare earths and both are present to varying degrees in all rare earth deposits. Rare earths are therefore recovered and processed together before sequential separation into individual rare earth elements. Prices for individual rare earths in pure oxide form can vary significantly with, generally speaking, the heavy rare earths trading at higher values. It should be noted the highest value heavy rare earth elements, namely europium, terbium and dysprosium, are contained at elevated levels at Zandkopsdrift by comparison to a number of other similar deposits being evaluated globally. It is also noteworthy that both the thorium and uranium content of the Zandkopsdrift resource are relatively low, at average grades of 178ppm and 47ppm respectively.

The oxides produced from processing rare earths are collectively referred to as rare earth oxides. Although rare earths are relatively common in the earth's crust, they often do not occur in high enough concentrations (or occur along with high levels of radioactive elements) to make their extraction economic. The oxides that are produced from processing the rare earth elements constitute the basic material that can be sold to the market or further processed into metals or alloys.> Their location in the periodic table is shown below.

        


Rare Earth Manufacturer & Supplier: Chinatungsten Online - http://www.chinatungsten.com
Tel.: 86 592 5129696; Fax: 86 592 5129797
Email: sales@chinatungsten.com
Tungsten News & Tungsten Prices, 3G Version: http://3g.chinatungsten.com
Tungsten News & Tungsten Prices, WML Version: http://m.chinatungsten.com

• < Prev
• Next >