Rare earth products by type or usage

Rare earth metals in special shapes

The shape of rare earth metals can be: foil, cylinder, wire, sheet, button, target, square, powder, small size metal, etc.

Rare earth products by type or usage

Application

Catalysis

In a variety of contexts, rare earth compounds are valued as catalysts: compounds that facilitate specific chemical reactions without being consumed in the reaction. Catalytic converters in automobiles use rare earth catalysts to react with toxic byproducts of fuel combustion, thereby making vehicle emissions less damaging to the environment. The oil industry uses rare earth-containing catalysts in the process of fluid catalytic cracking (FCC), which converts crude oil to refined products such as gasoline. Finally, in both research and industrial applications, rare earth compounds are used to catalyze a variety of organic synthesis reactions.

Alloys

Rare earth compounds are commonly added to metallic alloys to manipulate key properties of the final material, including grain size, malleability, ductility, resistance to impact, and sensitivity to variable or extreme conditions. Due to the expense of most rare earths, rare earth-containing alloys are frequently designed specifically for particularly demanding applications.

Batteries

Nickel-metal hydride (NiMH) batteries are a common type of rechargeable battery, used for both standard AA and AAA batteries for personal electronics and in more demanding applications as batteries for electric vehicles and as backup power sources for telecommunications applications. These batteries are valued for their relatively high energy density, which approaches that of lithium-ion batteries, and for their low temperature sensitivity compared to that of lead-acid batteries. Additionally, NiMH batteries were a desirable replacement for now mostly obsolete nickel-cadmium (NiCd) rechargeable batteries, as none of their components present environmental concerns comparable to the problem of cadmium toxicity. The vast majority of NiMH use a mixture of rare earth metals and more common metals at the negative electrode, as alternate compositions for the metal at this electrode tend to produce batteries with shorter lives.

Fuel Cells

Fuel cells can use rare earth elements in several ways: as catalysts for the fuel cell reaction, as stabilizers of the crystal often used for the electrolyte, and in interlayer materials between cells used to prevent unwanted reactions. Some types of fuel cells use other elements for all of these functions and do not require rare earth compounds at all, while others, such as solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs), require them for all three functions, though the amounts used still vary considerably based on the individual fuel cell’s design.

Glass and Ceramics

Rare earth elements and compounds are often used as additives in the production of glass and ceramics, or in special coatings for glass surfaces. The rare earths can be used to impart a variety of desirable properties to glasses and ceramics, including increased melting point and shock resistance and low rates of thermal expansion, but are most often noted for their optical properties. Depending on the application, rare earth additives may be used simply as coloring for aesthetic purposes, or may be used to block the transmission of specific wavelengths of light through windows, safety goggles, or optical filters.

Polishing

Cerium(IV) oxide is considered the superior abrasive for polishing of high-quality glass optical components. Additionally, nanostructured cerium oxide is used for the cleaning and polishing of silicon wafers in preparation for their use in integrated circuits or photovoltaics.

Permanent Magnets

Individual atoms of most rare earth elements can retain high magnetic moments in the solid state. In their pure form, these elements only act as permanent magnets at very low temperatures, but they can form compounds with transition metals that act as permanent magnets well above room temperature. These compounds are used in the production of rare earth magnets, which produce significantly stronger magnetic fields than alnico or ferrite magnets. The two types of rare earth magnets currently in use are neodymium magnets, which are comprised of an alloy of neodymium, iron, and boron, and samarium-cobalt magnets, which are an alloy of samarium and cobalt.

The high strength of rare earth magnets means smaller and lighter magnets can replace ferrite/alnico magnets for any given application. Therefore rare earth metals are in high demand in any application where strong permanent magnets are desirable and where size or weight of the magnet is a concern, including in electric motors and generators, hard disk drives, magnetic fasteners, speakers and headphones, and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines. Additionally, rare earth elements can be used to produce magnetic thin films used in digital information storage applications.

Phosphors

Phosphors are compounds that release energy in the form of light when stimulated by a particular energy source. Inorganic phosphors are usually made from a suitable host material—generally oxides, nitrides, sulfides, selenides, halides, or silicates of various metallic elements including some rare earths—with an added activator. The activator is a deliberately introduced impurity that causes deviations in the typical crystal structure called emission centers, which are responsible for the production of light by the phosphor.

Rare earth elements are used as activators in many phosphors. Rare-earth containing phosphors that produce light in response to the absorption energy in the form of light or electricity are a necessity for many everyday technologies, including fluorescent lights, display screens, sensors, and white LEDs. Additionally, there is a special class of phosphors known as scintillators which produce light in response to the absorption of ionizing radiation. Scintillators are essential to the production of radiation detectors and of sensors in medical diagnostic devices such as CT scanners, as well as to certain domains within experimental physics.

Lasers

All lasers produce a beam of electromagnetic radiation by a process of stimulated emission, in which an outside energy source is used to promote electrons within a gain medium to higher energy—“excited”-- quantum states. When these electrons return to their base states, energy is emitted in the form of a photon. Gain mediums are chosen on the basis of many properties, including whether the photons produced are of a desirable wavelength for a given application. Many types of lasers require gain mediums that contain one or more rare earth elements. Notably, crystals used as gain media in solid-state lasers may be doped with neodymium, ytterbium, holmium, thulium, or erbium, and all fiber lasers use rare-earth-doped optical fibers as the gain medium.

Lasers that require rare-earth compounds for construction have a broad range of applications, including material processing (cutting, engraving), telecommunications, spectroscopy, medical diagnosis and treatment, and directed energy weapons.

Medicine

In addition to being components of many key medical technologies, including the magnets in MRIs, sensors in PET machines, phosphor compounds used in some types of medical imaging, and crystals used in lasers for surgery and other treatments, rare earth elements or their compounds can be used more directly in some instances of medical treatment. The compound lanthanum carbonate is used to treat high blood phosphate levels in patients with kidney disease. Additionally, radioactive isotopes of yttrium and lutetium are used for targeted radiation therapy in some cancers, and an isotope of samarium is used to treat pain when cancer spreads to the bone. Finally, yttria-stabilized zirconia is used to fabricate needles for severing individual spinal nerves, as this substance can hold a sharper edge than conventional scalpels.

ATT manufactures a comprehensive of rare earth materials, including high purity and ultra high purity metals, oxides, compounds, and organometallics in forms such as powders, nanopowders, solutions, and sputtering targets. We can custom manufacture all materials to customer specifications for shape, size, purity, composition in all amounts including bulk quantities.