Where Can Vanadium Be Found?
Vanadium occurs widely in nature and has numerous industrial uses. Manufacturers often add vanadium to steel and use the element to bond titanium to other metals. Vanadium also has applications in the chemical and ceramic production fields. Last, the element's magnetic properties make it a key addition to many powerful alloy magnets in electronic devices.
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Ores and Other Sources
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Most vanadium comes from producers in the Czech Republic and South Africa. The element appears in more than 60 commercially mined ores, often in conjunctions with iron and phosphates. The best sources of vanadium include the minerals vanadinite, patronite, carnotite and roscoelite. Processors also recover vanadium from chemical byproducts and petroleum ash, as the element occurs naturally in liquid crude oil.
Steel Products
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The U.S. Geological Survey notes in its 2009 annual report on vanadium that 93 percent of the vanadium metal produced for commercial purposes gets used by steel manufacturers. A factsheet from the Los Alamos National Laboratories expands on this, explaining that makers of steel tools use vanadium combined with iron into the mineral ferrovanadium to strengthen their products for use in high-speed assembly processes. Also, because vanadium bonds so readily with most other metals, a foil made from the element often serves as the bonding material between steel and titanium.
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Catalysts
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The USGS identifies chemical catalyst as the second-most frequent commercial use of vanadium. The element, caustic in its own right, helps start that chemical reactions needed to produce sulfuric acid and maleic anhydride, which gets used to synthesize fumaric and tartaric acid.
Ceramics
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A common intermediate form of mineralized vanadium, vanadium pentoxide (V2O5), is a reddish powder that ceramics makers sometimes use as a coloring and hardening agent in their products.
Aluminum Products
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Alloying aluminum with vanadium makes the resulting metal useful for applications that require strong but lightweight materials, such as bearing assemblies in aircraft engines and radiation shields. Aluminum-vanadium also bonds well with titanium, making the resulting material a good choice for airframes.
Magnets
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Vanadium is highly magnetic in its elemental form. Consequently, manufacturers needing to generate powerful magnetic fields with small devices have added vanadium to other magnetic metals since at least the 1960s. Vanadium alloy magnets have appeared in computers, magnetic resonance imaging devices and electric fuel cells.
Foods
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People consume between 10 and 20 micrograms of vanadium each day because the elements occurs in groundwater and in most meats, vegetables, fish, dairy foods and cooking oils. The element does not appear to play a role in nutrition or metabolism, and, according to the U.S. Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, humans have experienced no known adverse health effects from natural ingestions of vanadium. While alternative medicine practitioners tout vanadium supplements as insulin-like additions to the diet that can help people with diabetes control their blood sugar, the Institute of Medicine has found no benefit from vanadium supplementation.
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References
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- Photo Credit National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences
