Vanadium V

Discovery

Vanadium was discovered twice. In 1801 the Spanish-born mineralogist Andrés Manuel del Río, working in Mexico, studied a brown lead ore (now called vanadinite) and reported a new metal. Because its salts showed many colours he first called it panchromium, then erythronium, since the salts turned red when heated. The French chemist Hippolyte-Victor Collet-Descotils, however, concluded that the sample was merely impure chromium, and del Río withdrew his claim.

In 1830 the Swedish chemist Nils Gabriel Sefström found a new element in iron from the Taberg mine and named it vanadium. Shortly afterwards Friedrich Wöhler showed that vanadium and del Río's erythronium were the same. Relatively pure metal was first produced in 1867 by Henry Enfield Roscoe, who reduced vanadium chloride with hydrogen.

Industrial interest rose in the early twentieth century; Henry Ford's Model T famously used vanadium steel in its chassis to combine strength and low weight.

Origin of the name

Sefström named the element after Vanadís, an Old Norse name of the goddess Freyja, associated with beauty, in honour of the beautifully coloured compounds of the element. The symbol is V.

Main uses

• Steel: the great majority of vanadium goes into steel, including tool steels, high-strength low-alloy steels for pipelines and bridges, and reinforcing bars.
• Titanium alloys: vanadium is one of the additives in Ti-6Al-4V, the most common aerospace titanium alloy.
• Catalysis: vanadium pentoxide is the catalyst used to make sulfuric acid by the contact process.
• Energy storage: vanadium redox flow batteries store electricity in tanks of vanadium solutions and can run through many thousands of cycles.

Isotopes

Natural vanadium is almost all vanadium-51, which is stable. About 0.25 percent is vanadium-50, which is radioactive but has an extraordinarily long half-life, around 10¹⁷ years, so it behaves as stable for all practical purposes. The artificial vanadium-48, with a half-life of about 16 days, is used in research as a tracer.

In everyday life

Some marine animals called sea squirts concentrate vanadium in their blood cells to levels millions of times higher than in seawater, for reasons still debated. Whether vanadium is essential for humans is not established; traces occur in mushrooms, shellfish and grains.

Vanadium is present in crude oil and coal, and vanadium pentoxide dust released from burning heavy oil can irritate the lungs, so it is controlled in workplaces.