Academic literature on the topic 'Lithium lanthanum zirconium oxide'

Of the naturally occurring nonradioactive elements, hafnium was the next to last to be discovered, preceding the discovery of rhenium by 3 years. It can boast of holding a very strange record: the number of claims for its discovery over the years is unequaled by any other element. This record was the cause of frustration for many scientists who, over the years, took turns in attempts to isolate it. The reason that hafnium remained undiscovered until 1922 lay not so much in that its presence in nature (long known to be quite scarce) wasn’t looked for, but in its peculiar chemical properties that bound it up intimately with zirconium. Toward the end of the 18th century, Martin Heinrich Klaproth melted some forms of yellow-green and red zirconium with sodium hydroxide and then digested the residue several times with hydrochloric and sulfuric acids to eliminate the extraneous silicon. The solution, thought to contain a number of elements, produced, upon addition of potassium carbonate, a generous precipitate. The oxide that Klaproth collected did not seem to belong to any known substance, and he called it terra zirconia. With the passing of the years, he and many other chemists, among them the renowned Jons Jacob Berzelius, determined the elemental composition of zircon and of its correlative minerals. Far from being simply ZrSiO4, zircon contained traces of iron, aluminum, nickel, cobalt, lead, bismuth, manganese, lithium, sodium, zinc, calcium, magnesium, and uranium and small amounts of the rare earths. Some impurities persistently resisted separation from zirconium oxide or zirconia and were taken erroneously for oxides of new elements (new earths). In 1825, Johann Friedrich August Breithaupt (1791–1873) reported the presence of a new element, ostranium, isolated from ostranite, a mineral similar to zircon. Twenty years later, the Swedish chemist, mineralogist, and metallurgist Lars Fredrik Svanberg (1805–78) announced the discovery of a new element. In his publication of 1845, he asserted that the zirconium oxide obtained from a variety of Siberian, Norwegian, and Indian zircon samples was in reality composed of two earths: one, zirconia, already noted, and another unknown earth.