What is the average atomic mass of scandium

Image explanation. The image reflects this with an ancient Scandinavian figurine and carved runic standing stone. A silvery metal that tarnishes in air, burns easily and reacts with water.

Scandium is mainly used for research purposes. It has, however, great potential because it has almost as low a density as aluminium and a much higher melting point. An aluminium-scandium alloy has been used in Russian MIG fighter planes, high-end bicycle frames and baseball bats. Scandium iodide is added to mercury vapour lamps to produce a highly efficient light source resembling sunlight. These lamps help television cameras to reproduce colour well when filming indoors or at night-time.

The radioactive isotope scandium is used as a tracer in oil refining to monitor the movement of various fractions. It can also be used in underground pipes to detect leaks. Biological role. Scandium has no known biological role. It is a suspected carcinogen. Natural abundance. Scandium is very widely distributed, and occurs in minute quantities in over mineral species.

It is the main component of the very rare and collectable mineral thortveitite, found in Scandinavia. Scandium can be recovered from thortveitite or extracted as a by-product from uranium mill tailings sandy waste material. Metallic scandium can be prepared by reducing the fluoride with calcium metal.

It can also be prepared by electrolysing molten potassium, lithium and scandium chlorides, using electrodes of tungsten wire and molten zinc. Help text not available for this section currently. Elements and Periodic Table History. In , Mendeleev noticed that there was a gap in atomic weights between calcium 40 and titanium 48 and predicted there was an undiscovered element of intermediate atomic weight.

He forecast that its oxide would be X 2 O 3. He extracted it from euxenite, a complex mineral containing eight metal oxides. He had already extracted erbium oxide from euxenite, and from this oxide he obtained ytterbium oxide and then another oxide of a lighter element whose atomic spectrum showed it to be an unknown metal.

This was the metal that Mendeleev had predicted and its oxide was Sc 2 O 3. Scandium metal itself was only produced in by the electrolysis of molten scandium chloride. Atomic data. Glossary Common oxidation states The oxidation state of an atom is a measure of the degree of oxidation of an atom. Oxidation states and isotopes.

Glossary Data for this section been provided by the British Geological Survey. Relative supply risk An integrated supply risk index from 1 very low risk to 10 very high risk. Recycling rate The percentage of a commodity which is recycled.

Substitutability The availability of suitable substitutes for a given commodity. Reserve distribution The percentage of the world reserves located in the country with the largest reserves. Political stability of top producer A percentile rank for the political stability of the top producing country, derived from World Bank governance indicators. Political stability of top reserve holder A percentile rank for the political stability of the country with the largest reserves, derived from World Bank governance indicators.

Supply risk. Relative supply risk 9. Russia 3 USA Political stability of top producer Young's modulus A measure of the stiffness of a substance. Shear modulus A measure of how difficult it is to deform a material. Bulk modulus A measure of how difficult it is to compress a substance.

Vapour pressure A measure of the propensity of a substance to evaporate. Pressure and temperature data — advanced. Listen to Scandium Podcast Transcript :. You're listening to Chemistry in its element brought to you by Chemistry World , the magazine of the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Scandium, atomic number It is the first of the transition metals, and its discovery is entwined with that of vertical neighbours yttrium and lanthanum. A quarry near the village of Ytterby yielded two different mineral ores, from which the seventeen so-called "rare earth" elements were eventually identified, those being scandium, yttrium and the fifteen lanthanide elements.

In , a Lieutenant Arrhenius found an unusual black rock near the town of Ytterby. He passed this on to the famous Finnish scientist Johan Gadolin, and the story of the discovery of the rare earths began.

In , Lars Nilson, isolated the oxide of a new metal element from the minerals gadolinite and euxenite. Nilson was a student of the legendary Jacob Berzelius, himself discoverer of many elements. Nilson named this oxide scandia, after Scandinavia. The discovery of this element was especially notable, as, seven years previously, Mendeleev had used his periodic table to predict the existence of ten as yet unknown elements, and for four of these, he predicted in great detail the properties they should have.

One of these four, Mendeleev predicted, should have properties very similar to boron, and he named this element "ekaboron", meaning "like boron".

The metal of this new oxide, scandia, was indeed found to have similar properties to this "ekaboron", thus demonstrating the power of Mendeleev's construction. For example, Mendeleev predicted the element's molecular weight would be 44 and that it would form one oxide with formula Eb 2 O 3 ; scandium has molecular weight 45, and forms scandium oxide, Sc 2 O 3.

Some of Mendeleev's predictions were even more detailed. He predicted that the carbonate of ekaboron would not be soluble in water, which scandium carbonate is not. He even made a prediction related to the discovery of the element - that it would not be discovered spectroscopically. Indeed, scandium produces no spectroscopic lines, so could not be identified by this method of analysis.

However, it was another Swedish chemist, Per Theodor Cleve, who was also working on the rare earths, who noticed the similarity between Nilson's new element, and the ekaboron predicted by Mendeleev. Despite the discovery of the oxide of this new element, it would take almost another sixty years until pure, elemental scandium was prepared, being made by electrolysis of scandium chloride in the presence of lithium and potassium, at high temperature. Scandium is the first of the transition metals.

Many of the transition metals exhibit a very rich and varied chemistry, due to the fact that they can exist in a wide variety of oxidation states. Scandium, however, is limited to the plus three oxidation state, meaning its chemistry is not quite as diverse as some of its transition metal counterparts.

Scandium is very much a late starter compared to many of the other elements, due to its relatively low occurrence and the difficulty in obtaining it from its ores. For example, it wasn't until the s when the first pound, or grams, of high purity scandium was obtained. Compounds of scandium find use in organic chemistry. Like many of the lanthanides, the trifluoromethansulfonate, or triflate, of scandium finds use as a so-called Lewis acid, accepting a pair of electrons from a suitable organic molecule, and activating the organic molecule to take part in highly efficient and selective chemical reactions.

Scandium is also the source of artificial natural light. This might sound like a contradiction, but when scandium iodide is added in very small amounts to mercury vapour lamps, it produces light that is very similar to natural sunlight, and these lamps are used for applications ranging from floodlights to film projectors. Scandium is added in small amounts to aluminium, to produce an alloy which is very light, yet very strong.

As such, it has found use as a material for high performance road and mountain bikes. The advent of new frame materials, such as carbon fibre and titanium, has somewhat lessened the popularity of scandium alloy bike frames, but many such frames are still being made today.

So, that's Scandium - the element first found in the late eighteenth century, and not isolated pure and in large quantities until the middle of the twentieth century. One which helped demonstrate the power of the periodic table, and which you'll find illuminating football fields, and in the frames of mountain bikes. One molecule of water H 2 O would weigh The original periodic table of the elements published by Dimitri Mendeleev in arranged the elements that were known at the time in order of increasing atomic weight, since this was prior to the discovery of the nucleus and the interior structure of the atom.

The modern periodic table is arranged in order of increasing atomic number instead. Atomic Number. This was the atomic mass of the first 30 elements.

Let us now learn the difference between atomic number and atomic mass of elements. Let us now learn about the difference between the atomic number of elements and their atomic mass.

Atomic mass is related to the number of neutrons and protons which are present in the nucleus of an element. Atomic number refers to the number of protons that are present in the nucleus of an element. It refers to the average weight of a particular element. Atomic mass is denoted by the letter A. The letter Z is used for representing the atomic number. Atomic mass cannot be used for defining the type of element.