Yttrium is a silvery-metallic transition metal chemically similar to the lanthanides. It is almost always found in combination with lanthanide elements in rare-earth minerals, and is never found in nature as a free element. Yttrium has no known biological role. Exposure to yttrium compounds can cause lung disease in humans.
About Yttrium in brief
Yttrium is a silvery-metallic transition metal chemically similar to the lanthanides. It is almost always found in combination with lanthanide elements in rare-earth minerals, and is never found in nature as a free element. Yttrium has no known biological role. Exposure to yttrium compounds can cause lung disease in humans. The name is historical and comes from the village of Ytterby, in Sweden where, in 1787, the chemist Arrhenius found a new mineral and named it ytterbite. The pure element is relatively stable in air in bulk form, due to passivation of a protective oxide film that forms on the surface. The element is so close in size to the so-called ‘yttrium group’ of heavy Lanthanide ions that in solution, it behaves as if it were one of them. If physical properties were plotted against atomic number, it would have an apparent number of 64. 5 to 67. 5, placing it between gadolinium and erbium. It often also falls in the same range for reaction order, resembling terbium and dysprosium in its chemical reactivity. A few of these compounds are known to have the oxidation state of 0 °C. Organoyttrium chemistry is the study of compounds containing carbon–yttium bonds. The most important uses of yttium are LEDs and phosphors, particularly the red phosphors in television set cathode ray tube displays.
It can also be used in the production of electrodes, electrolytes, electronic filters, lasers, superconductors, various medical applications, and tracing various materials to enhance their properties. The Yttium ion is colorless in solution because of the absence of electrons in the d2O3+3+ ion. Water and electron shells are all soluble in water. It readily reacts with its compounds to form 2O3 nitric acids, but do not rapidly attack other strong acids. It forms a water-insoluble fluoride, hydroxide, and oxalate, but its bromide, chloride, iodide, nitrate and sulfate are allsoluble in water, but are all solvable in water in the +3 oxidation state. It also forms trihalides such as yttria, a six-coordinate white solid. It has been classified as a ‘rare-earth element’ because of its similarities to the Lanthanides, but it is not found in the Earth’s crust. It’s more electronegative than lanthanum, but less electrone gative than lutetium due to the lunaride contraction. The first d-block element in the fifth period, it is also the only isotope found in earth’s crust, and the only stable isotope in the planet’s crust and in the solar system. It is the only member of period 5, zirconium, to have an atomic number of 89.
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This page is based on the article Yttrium published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 03, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
