Rare earths are lanthanides and scandium, yttrium*** seventeen metal elements in the periodic table. Rare earths are known as industrial "gold", due to their excellent physical properties such as optical and electromagnetic, can be composed of other materials with different properties, a wide range of new materials, its most significant function is to significantly improve the quality and performance of other products.
For example, greatly improve the tactical performance of steel, aluminum alloy, magnesium alloy, titanium alloy used in the manufacture of tanks, aircraft, missiles. Moreover, rare earths are likewise lubricants for electronics, lasers, the nuclear industry, superconductivity and many other high technologies.
Rare earth technology, once used in the military, is bound to bring about a leap in military technology. In a certain sense, the military in the post-Cold War several local wars in overwhelming control, as well as the ability to kill the enemy with impunity and openly, is due to the field of rare earth science and technology superhuman first.
Rare earth metals or fluoride, silicides added to steel, can play a role in refining, desulfurization, neutralization of low melting point harmful impurities, and can improve the processing performance of steel; rare earth ferrosilicon alloy, rare earth silicon magnesium alloy as a spheroidal agent for the production of rare earth ductile cast iron.
Because of this ductile iron is particularly suitable for the production of complex ductile iron parts with special requirements, is widely used in automobiles, tractors, diesel engines and other machinery manufacturing industry; rare earth metals added to magnesium, aluminum, copper, zinc, nickel and other non-ferrous alloys, can improve the physical and chemical properties of the alloy, and improve the alloys of room temperature and high temperature mechanical properties.
Extended information
The Commerce Ministry said China's rare earth reserves will last only 20 years, and China's rare earth reserves plunged 37 percent between 1996 and 2009, leaving only 27 million tons, or 23 percent of the world's reserves.
At the rate of production, China's reserves of rare earths in the medium and heavy categories will last only 15 to 20 years, and imports are likely to be needed. China is not the only country in the world that possesses rare earths, yet it has taken on the role of supplying most of the world's rare earths over the past few decades, and as a result has paid the price of destroying its own natural environment and depleting its own resources.
Japan has begun to look around the world for an alternative to China as a source of rare earths. Tokyo plans to invest $1.2 billion to improve the supply of rare earths. Japan has already struck a lightning deal with Mongolia to develop that country's rare-earth resources starting this month.
South Korea, another major rare-earth consumer, has similar plans. The Japanese media are hailing another major discovery -- the Pacific Ocean floor is full of rare earths. According to foreign media reports, the online edition of the British journal Nature Geoscience published the findings of a research team led by Taeho Kato, an associate professor at the University of Tokyo in Japan, on March 3rd.
The research results said, including the Hawaiian Islands, including the central Pacific Ocean, about 8.8 million square kilometers of sea and southeastern Tahiti near the island of about 2.4 million square kilometers of sea silt, containing high concentrations of rare earths, the entire amount of exploitable about 1,000 times the amount on land.
Baidu Encyclopedia - Rare Earths