Where is the element gadolinium found

As a result, gadolinium control rods quickly lose their effectiveness. Gadolinium can be combined with yttrium to form garnets that have applications in microwave technology. Gadolinium can be alloyed with iron , chromium and other metals to improve their workability and their resistance to high temperatures and oxidation. Gadolinium compounds are used to make phosphors for color televisions. Number of Stable Isotopes : 5 View all isotope data.

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Jump to main content. Periodic Table. Glossary Allotropes Some elements exist in several different structural forms, called allotropes. Glossary Group A vertical column in the periodic table. Fact box. Glossary Image explanation Murray Robertson is the artist behind the images which make up Visual Elements. Appearance The description of the element in its natural form.

Biological role The role of the element in humans, animals and plants. Natural abundance Where the element is most commonly found in nature, and how it is sourced commercially. Uses and properties. Image explanation. The image reflects the past use of the element in television screens.

A soft, silvery metal that reacts with oxygen and water. Gadolinium has useful properties in alloys. It is also used in alloys for making magnets, electronic components and data storage disks.

Its compounds are useful in magnetic resonance imaging MRI , particularly in diagnosing cancerous tumours. Biological role. Gadolinium has no known biological role, and has low toxicity. Natural abundance.

In common with other lanthanides, gadolinium is mainly found in the minerals monazite and bastnaesite. It can be commercially prepared from these minerals by ion exchange and solvent extraction. It is also prepared by reducing anhydrous gadolinium fluoride with calcium metal. Help text not available for this section currently. Elements and Periodic Table History. Gadolinium was discovered in by Charles Galissard de Marignac at Geneva. He had long suspected that the didymium reported by Carl Mosander was not a new element but a mixture.

His suspicions were confirmed when Marc Delafontaine and Paul-Emile Lecoq de Boisbaudran at Paris reported that its spectral lines varied according to the source from which it came. Indeed, in they had already separated samarium from some didymium which had been extracted from the mineral samarskite, found in the Urals. 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 Gadolinium Podcast Transcript :. You're listening to Chemistry in its element brought to you by Chemistry World , the magazine of the Royal Society of Chemistry.

It's always interesting to know where an element takes its name. The family of elements that we call the lanthanides, or lanthanoids, have a somewhat random selection of names. That's because identifying the 15 lanthanide elements took over one hundred and fifty years, from the isolation of the first compounds to the synthesis of the last lanthanide, radioactive promethium, in Some are named after gods, such as cerium; some like europium are named after places; and others including gadolinium, the star of this podcast, derive their names from scientists.

Gadolinium is named after Johan Gadolin, a Finnish scientist who was both a chemist and geologist. In he isolated the first rare earth compound, what we now know as yttrium oxide, from a black mineral that had been discovered at Ytterby in Sweden. A few years later this ore, which contained a number of lanthanides, was named gadolinite. Because of the difficulty in separating the very similar lanthanides, it was not until that a Swiss chemist named de Marignac identified spectroscopic lines due to the element we now know as gadolinium.

Six years later, in , the French chemist de Boisbaudran isolated the pure oxide, and called the element gadolinium, as it was obtained from gadolinite. Metallic gadolinium was not isolated until , and like all the other lanthanides, it is a reactive metal.

This ion is colourless and does not at first glance seem very interesting. But like most other lanthanides and indeed transition metals, it has several unpaired electrons, giving it interesting magnetic properties.

In fact this ion has 7 unpaired electrons in its 4f orbitals giving it a very large magnetic moment, and scientists are currently interested in making use of this. As everyone knows, chlorofluorocarbons, CFCs for short, have been widely used in the past in fridges and freezers as the refrigerant gas. CFCs contribute to both depleting the Ozone layer and they are also Greenhouse gases, and due to this their use in the developed world has largely ceased.

Meaning a good, more environmentally friendly, replacement is needed. Gadolinium may prove useful the fridges of the future due to a process known as magnetic refrigeration or adiabatic demagnetisation. A magnetic fridge has actually been constructed making use of gadolinium's ability to do this. The fridge contains a wheel with segments of powdered gadolinium, and as the wheel turns it passes through a gap between the poles of a very powerful magnet.

When gadolinium is in the magnetic field it heats up, so it has to be cooled down by passing water through it. Gadolinium becomes superconductive below K. It is strongly magnetic at room temperature. Gadolinium has found some use in control rods for nuclear reactors and nuclear power plants; it is used to make garnets for microwave applications and its compounds are used for making phosphorous for colour TV tubes. Metallic gadolinium is rarely used as the metal itself, but its alloys are used to make magnets and electronic components such as recording heads for video recorders.

It is also used for manufacturing compact disks and computer memory. Gadolinium is one of the more abundant rare-earth elements. It is never found as free element in nature, but it is contained in many rare minerals.

World production of pure gadolinium is about tonnes per year.