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What is yttrium used for in everyday life?
Yttrium can be used as an additive to strengthen metals, like aluminum and magnesium alloys. It’s also used to help make microwave filters, high-temperature superconductors, oxygen sensors, white LED lights, and metal-cutting lasers. When added to camera lenses, the camera lenses become heat and shock resistant.
What things have yttrium in them?
Transition metals tend to be strong but pliable, which is why some of them, such as copper and nickel, are widely used for wires. Yttrium wires and rods are also used in electronics and solar energy. Yttrium is also used in lasers, ceramics, camera lenses, and dozens of other items.
What is ytterbium most commonly used for?
One ytterbium isotope has been used as a radiation source substitute for a portable X-ray machine when electricity was not available. Like other rare-earth elements, it can be used to dope phosphors, or for ceramic capacitors and other electronic devices, and it can even act as an industrial catalyst.
Is yttrium used in microphones?
Garnets created from yttrium, iron, aluminum and gadolinium are used in transducers and transmitters for sound because of their magnetic properties. A transducer takes sound waves and changes them into energy in machines such as microphones, headphones, and guitar parts.
Does the human body use yttrium?
The radioactive isotope yttrium-90 has medical uses. It can be used to treat some cancers, such as liver cancer. Yttrium has no known biological role.
Where is yttrium most commonly found?
Natural abundance It is mined in China and Malaysia. Yttrium also occurs in the other ‘rare earth’ minerals, monazite and bastnaesite. Yttrium metal is produced by reducing yttrium fluoride with calcium metal.
What are 3 uses for ytterbium?
Ytterbium has few uses. It can be alloyed with stainless steel to improve some of its mechanical properties and used as a doping agent in fiber optic cable where it can be used as an amplifier. One of ytterbium’s isotopes is being considered as a radiation source for portable X-ray machines.
How was ytterbium named?
Ytterbium is named after the town of Ytterby near Stockholm in Sweden, and makes up the fourth element to be named after this town, the others being of course yttrium, terbium and erbium.