Energy & Green Tech

Cobalt-free electrodes achieved with nickel ions

Many electric vehicles are powered by lithium-ion batteries that rely on cobalt—a scarce, expensive metal with high environmental and social costs. A team of researchers from Japanese and French universities has now developed ...

Energy & Green Tech

Scientists design cobalt-free battery for cleaner, greener power

High-capacity and reliable rechargeable batteries are a critical component of many devices and even modes of transport. They play a key role in the shift to a greener world. A wide variety of elements are used in their production, ...

Energy & Green Tech

Scientists create long-lasting, cobalt-free, lithium-ion batteries

In a discovery that could reduce or even eliminate the use of cobalt—which is often mined using child labor—in the batteries that power electric cars and other products, scientists at the University of California, Irvine ...

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Cobalt

Cobalt ( /ˈkoʊbɒlt/ or /ˈkoʊbɔːlt/) is a chemical element with symbol Co and atomic number 27. It is found naturally only in chemically combined form. The free element, produced by reductive smelting, is a hard, lustrous, silver-gray metal.

Cobalt-based blue pigments have been used since ancient times for jewelry and paints, and to impart a distinctive blue tint to glass, but the color was later thought by alchemists to be due to the known metal bismuth. Miners had long used the name kobold ore (German for goblin ore) for some of the blue-pigment producing minerals; they were named because they were poor in known metals and gave poisonous arsenic-containing fumes upon smelting. In 1735, such ores were found to be reducible to a new metal (the first discovered since ancient times), and this was ultimately named for the kobold.

Nowadays, some cobalt is produced specifically from various metallic-lustered ores, for example cobaltite (CoAsS), but the main source of the element is as a by-product of copper and nickel mining. The copper belt in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Zambia yields most of the cobalt metal mined worldwide.

Cobalt is used in the preparation of magnetic, wear-resistant and high-strength alloys. Cobalt silicate and cobalt(II) aluminate (CoAl2O4, cobalt blue) give a distinctive deep blue color to glass, smalt, ceramics, inks, paints and varnishes. Cobalt occurs naturally as only one stable isotope, cobalt-59. Cobalt-60 is a commercially important radioisotope, used as a radioactive tracer and in the production of gamma rays.

Cobalt is the active center of coenzymes called cobalamin or vitamin B12, and is an essential trace element for all animals. Cobalt is also an active nutrient for bacteria, algae and fungi.

This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA