Usage And Applications Of Niobium

1. Usage And Applications Of Niobium The consumption of niobium is dominated by its use as an additive for low alloy steel and high resistance stainless steel for oil and gas pipelines, automobile and truck bodies, architectural requirements, niobium rod, ship hulls, railroads. However, there are other applications for niobium metal and its compounds. Although niobium has many applications, most are used in the production of high quality structural steel. Some more unusual applications Quantum computer chips The quantum computers developed by IBM in their Q laboratory are based on superconducting components made of aluminum and niobium that are on a silicon substrate (the two superconducting electrodes are between an insulator, or Josephson junction, of aluminum oxide). Unlike classical computers, which use binary digits (bits) that can have one of two states (0 or 1) at a time to solve mathematical and logical operations, a quantum computer uses quantum bits that can have two states simultaneously.

2. High entropy alloys (HEA) It has been shown that an alloy of tantalum, niobium, hafnium, zirconium and titanium conducts electricity with zero resistance, or super conduct, from environmental pressure to pressures similar to those near the center of the Earth. The material is a member of a new family of metal alloys known as high entropy alloys (HEA), which are composed of atomic-scale random mixtures of elements of the "transition metals" block in the periodic table. HEAs have simple crystalline structures, but the metals are randomly arranged at the points of the network, giving each alloy the properties of a glass and a crystalline material. The HEA studied in this paper is unique because it cans continuously super conduct from low to high pressures. This discovery was made by a group of scientists from the Institute of Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Department of Chemistry at Princeton University. Gravimeters Gravimeters measure changes in Earth's gravity. Any fluctuation in the gravitational field pulls and pulls the sphere, changing its position slightly, disturbing the magnetic field and sending electrical signals to nearby sensors. The niobium wire coils, which are also maintained at this low temperature, offer no resistance to the electric current flowing through them, producing the perfectly stable magnetic field that levitates the niobium sphere. Before the niobium superconductors were developed, the older gravimeters used reference weights attached to mechanical springs. Source: https://bit.ly/2JrBTGQ