| Discovery date | 1751 |
| Discovered by | Axel Fredrik Cronstedt |
| Origin of the name | The name is the shortened for of the German 'kupfernickel' meaning either devil's copper or St. Nicholas's copper. |
| Allotropes |
|
Ni
Nickel
28
58.693
| Group | 10 | Melting point | 1455°C, 2651°F, 1728 K |
| Period | 4 | Boiling point | 2913°C, 5275°F, 3186 K |
| Block | d | Density (g cm−3) | 8.90 |
| Atomic number | 28 | Relative atomic mass | 58.693 |
| State at 20°C | Solid | Key isotopes | 58Ni |
| Electron configuration | [Ar] 3d84s2 | CAS number | 7440-02-0 |
| ChemSpider ID | 910 | ChemSpider is a free chemical structure database | |
Image explanation
The image is of baked beans, which contain a surprising amount of nickel.
Appearance
A silvery metal that resists corrosion even at high temperatures.
Uses
Nickel resists corrosion and is used to plate other metals to protect them. It is, however, mainly used in making alloys such as stainless steel. Nichrome is an alloy of nickel and chromium with small amounts of silicon, manganese and iron. It resists corrosion, even when red hot, so is used in toasters and electric ovens. A copper-nickel alloy is commonly used in desalination plants, which convert seawater into fresh water. Nickel steel is used for armour plating. Other alloys of nickel are used in boat propeller shafts and turbine blades.
Nickel is used in batteries, including rechargeable nickel-cadmium batteries and nickel-metal hydride batteries used in hybrid vehicles.
Nickel has a long history of being used in coins. The US five-cent piece (known as a ‘nickel’) is 25% nickel and 75% copper.
Finely divided nickel is used as a catalyst for hydrogenating vegetable oils. Adding nickel to glass gives it a green colour.
Biological role
The biological role of nickel is uncertain. It can affect the growth of plants and has been shown to be essential to some species.
Some nickel compounds can cause cancer if the dust is inhaled, and some people are allergic to contact with the metal.
Nickel cannot be avoided completely. We take in nickel compounds with our diet. It is an essential element for some beans, such as the navy bean that is used for baked beans.
Natural abundance
The minerals from which most nickel is extracted are iron/nickel sulfides such as pentlandite. It is also found in other minerals, including garnierite.
A substantial amount of the nickel on Earth arrived with meteorites. One of these landed in the region near Ontario, Canada, hundreds of millions of years ago. This region is now responsible for about 15% of the world’s production.
Meteorites contain both iron and nickel, and earlier ages used them as a superior form of iron. Because the metal did not rust, it was regarded by the natives of Peru as a kind of silver. A zinc-nickel alloy called pai-t’ung (white copper) was in use in China as long ago as 200 BC. Some even reached Europe.
In 1751, Axel Fredrik Cronstedt, working at Stockholm, investigated a new mineral – now called nickeline (NiAs) – which came from a mine at Los, Hälsingland, Sweden. He thought it might contain copper but what he extracted was a new metal which he announced and named nickel in 1754. Many chemists thought it was an alloy of cobalt, arsenic, iron and copper – these elements were present as trace contaminants. It was not until 1775 that pure nickel was produced by Torbern Bergman and this confirmed its elemental nature.
| Atomic radius, non-bonded (Å) | 1.97 | Covalent radius (Å) | 1.17 |
| Electron affinity (kJ mol−1) | 111.537 |
Electronegativity (Pauling scale) |
1.91 |
|
Ionisation energies (kJ mol−1) |
1st
737.129
2nd
1753.027
3rd
3395.32
4th
5297
5th
7338.67
6th
10420
7th
12833
8th
15631
|
||
| Common oxidation states | 3, 2, 0 | ||||
| Isotopes | Isotope | Atomic mass | Natural abundance (%) | Half life | Mode of decay |
| 58Ni | 57.935 | 68.077 | > 4 x 1019 y | EC-EC | |
| 60Ni | 59.931 | 26.223 | - | - | |
| 61Ni | 60.931 | 1.1399 | - | - | |
| 62Ni | 61.928 | 3.6346 | - | - | |
| 64Ni | 63.928 | 0.9255 | - | - | |
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Specific heat capacity (J kg−1 K−1) |
444 | Young's modulus (GPa) | 199.5 (soft): 219.2 (hard) | |||||||||||
| Shear modulus (GPa) | 76.0 (soft): 83.9 (hard) | Bulk modulus (GPa) | 177.3 (soft); 187.6 (hard) | |||||||||||
| Vapour pressure | ||||||||||||||
| Temperature (K) |
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| Pressure (Pa) |
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| Listen to Nickel Podcast |
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Transcript :
Chemistry in its element: nickel(Promo) You're listening to Chemistry in its element brought to you by Chemistry World, the magazine of the Royal Society of Chemistry. (End promo) Meera Senthilingam This week even art galleries can spark chemical, or elemental, discussions. Andrea Sella. Andrea Sella Several years ago, I went with a friend to a small exhibition at London's National Gallery. It was a rare opportunity to see the masterpieces from the Doria Pamphilii gallery in Rome. The centrepiece was the famous portrait of Pope Innocent X by Velazquez, a spectacular snapshot of one of the most powerful men of his day, a tough-looking character in a gilded throne, sporting a neat goatee and a fierce and uncompromising glint in his eye. Across from it were hung Francis Bacon's disturbing Three Screaming Popes, nightmarish variants on Velazquez' theme. The pictures were so ugly and brutal that I instinctively blinked and looked away, upwards. Unexpectedly, my eyes fell on a set of golden letters across the top of the doorway. I giggled and my friend said to me, 'what's so funny? These pictures are just awful.' 'Mond', I replied, 'fancy finding him here.' 'Who?' she asked, looking puzzled. 'Mond,' I replied. 'This gallery was endowed by Ludwig Mond, the chemist who made nickel available to the world.' I fully expected her to roll her eyes and give me that pitying look that women reserve for the moment when the real nerd in a man is finally revealed. But there was none of that. 'I've never heard of him,' she said. 'Did he discover it?' 'No. He didn't. Nickel had been known for some time before that - it had been used in China and Peru to make a kind of steel. But it wasn't until the 19th century that two Swedish chemists, Cronstedt and Bergmann between them established that it was an element. It was named nickel after one of its ores, a reddish material that German miners called kupfernickel - St Nicholas's copper.' 'But isn't nickel rather nasty? Wasn't there some problem with nickel jewellery?' my friend asked. 'Yes. Nickel has long been used in alloys and to plate other metals - the nickel provides a tough resistant and shiny coating that protects the object from corrosion.' 'Oh, you mean a bit like chrome plating '. 'Yes, a bit like chrome, but less vulgar - chromium gives a brilliant shine. Nickel is a bit more subdued.' 'You mean classy.' 'I guess so. But the problem is that in contact with the skin, as in jewellery, the tiny amounts of nickel that dissolves in the sweat of the wearer was enough to cause skin reactions in some people and the using nickel turned out not to be a great idea.' 'But what about Mond?' 'Oh yeah. Right.' I replied. 'Mond was a German chemist who moved to the UK. And he had a problem - he was passing carbon monoxide gas through nickel valves and these kept failing and leaking. What Mond and his assistant Langer discovered was something remarkable - that his valves were corroding because the metal reacted with carbon monoxide, to make a compound called nickel carbonyl.' 'So what?' 'Well nickel carbonyl turned out to be a very volatile colourless liquid, one that boils just below room temperature.' 'Hmmm. Sounds a bit nasty,' she said doubtfully. 'Oh yes. Very. Because it's so volatile, you need to be really careful when you handle it since if you inhale it, it will decompose releasing poisonous carbon monoxide and dumping metallic nickel into your lungs. So it's very dangerous indeed. But in a way, that's the beauty of it: nickel carbonyl is incredibly fragile. If you heat it up it shakes itself to pieces, and you get both the nickel and the carbon monoxide back. So what Mond had was a deliciously simple way to separate and purify nickel from any other metal. And what is more, he could recycle the carbon monoxide.' 'Wow.' 'Mond wasn't just an observant chemist. He was also a pretty savvy business man. He patented his process and set up in business to sell the purest nickel at prices far lower than anyone else. He made an absolute fortune, and then steadily expanded into other areas of chemistry. His firm would eventually form the core of Imperial Chemical Industries, ICI, the conglomerate set up to defend British interests against, ironically, the onslaught of the burgeoning German chemicals industry.' 'So what do people do with nickel today, if it's so nasty,' she asked. 'Well, it's not really that nasty, provided you're careful in what you use it for. In the 1960s another German chemist named Wilke developed nickel compounds as cheap and simple catalysts for the petrochemicals industry to clip together small carbon molecules. It's also used in all sorts of alloys. There's Invar which is a kind of metallic pyrex, that doesn't expand or contract when you change the temperature. There's Monel, a steel so corrosion resistant that it will withstand even fluorine, which eats its way through just about anything. And there's the really weird memory metal, an alloy that no matter how much you twist and bend it, remembers its original shape and returns to it. And then there's superalloys made of nickel and aluminium with a dab of boron that are extremely light and actually get tougher as you heat them - so they're used in aircraft and rocket turbines.' I could see I was going a bit too far. We turned back to the Pope. 'He must have been a bruiser,' I said. 'You know what I like about you?' my friend asked giving my arm a squeeze. 'It's that we go to see paintings and I end up hearing about weird stuff.' 'And you know what I like about you,' I replied. 'It's that you humour me when I go off on one.' No doubt you're expecting me to say that it all ended happily. It didn't, and I haven't seen her in years. But weirdly enough, every time I think of nickel, I think of her. And the filthy look the Pope gave me. Meera Senthilingam So superalloys, relationships and the pope, what diverse chemical thoughts and stories nickel provokes. That was UCL's Andrea Sella with a contemporary story to nickel. Now next week the discovery of xenon. Peter Wothers The story of xenon begins in 1894 when Lord Rayleigh and William Ramsay were investigating why nitrogen extracted from chemical compounds is about one-half per cent lighter than nitrogen extracted from the air - an observation first made by Henry Cavendish 100 years earlier. Ramsay found that after atmospheric nitrogen has reacted with hot magnesium metal, a tiny proportion of a heavier and even less reactive gas is left over. They named this gas argon from the Greek for lazy or inactive to reflect its extreme inertness. The problem was, where did this new element fit into Mendeleev's periodic table of the elements? There were no other known elements that it resembled which led them to suspect that there was a whole family of elements yet to be discovered. Remarkably, this turned out to be the case. Meera Senthilingam And to hear how this story paned out, leading to the discovery of a new family of elements as well as xenon that would go on to light our roads and propel spaceships join Cambridge University's Peter Wothers in next week's Chemistry in its element. Until then thank you for listening, I'm Meera Senthilingam (Promo) Chemistry in its element is brought to you by the Royal Society of Chemistry and produced by thenakedscientists.com. There's more information and other episodes of Chemistry in its element on our website at chemistryworld.org/elements. (End promo)
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Visual Elements images and videos
© Murray Robertson 1998-2017.
W. M. Haynes, ed., CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, CRC Press/Taylor and Francis, Boca Raton, FL, 95th Edition, Internet Version 2015, accessed December 2014.
Tables of Physical & Chemical Constants, Kaye & Laby Online, 16th edition, 1995. Version 1.0 (2005), accessed December 2014.
J. S. Coursey, D. J. Schwab, J. J. Tsai, and R. A. Dragoset, Atomic Weights and Isotopic Compositions (version 4.1), 2015, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD, accessed November 2016.
T. L. Cottrell, The Strengths of Chemical Bonds, Butterworth, London, 1954.
John Emsley, Nature’s Building Blocks: An A-Z Guide to the Elements, Oxford University Press, New York, 2nd Edition, 2011.
Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility - Office of Science Education, It’s Elemental - The Periodic Table of Elements, accessed December 2014.
Periodic Table of Videos, accessed December 2014.
Derived in part from material provided by the British Geological Survey © NERC.
Elements 1-112, 114, 116 and 117 © John Emsley 2012. Elements 113, 115, 117 and 118 © Royal Society of Chemistry 2017.
Produced by The Naked Scientists.
Created by video journalist Brady Haran working with chemists at The University of Nottingham.
© Murray Robertson 1998-2017.
Data
W. M. Haynes, ed., CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, CRC Press/Taylor and Francis, Boca Raton, FL, 95th Edition, Internet Version 2015, accessed December 2014.
Tables of Physical & Chemical Constants, Kaye & Laby Online, 16th edition, 1995. Version 1.0 (2005), accessed December 2014.
J. S. Coursey, D. J. Schwab, J. J. Tsai, and R. A. Dragoset, Atomic Weights and Isotopic Compositions (version 4.1), 2015, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD, accessed November 2016.
T. L. Cottrell, The Strengths of Chemical Bonds, Butterworth, London, 1954.
Uses and properties
John Emsley, Nature’s Building Blocks: An A-Z Guide to the Elements, Oxford University Press, New York, 2nd Edition, 2011.
Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility - Office of Science Education, It’s Elemental - The Periodic Table of Elements, accessed December 2014.
Periodic Table of Videos, accessed December 2014.
Supply risk data
Derived in part from material provided by the British Geological Survey © NERC.
History text
Elements 1-112, 114, 116 and 117 © John Emsley 2012. Elements 113, 115, 117 and 118 © Royal Society of Chemistry 2017.
Podcasts
Produced by The Naked Scientists.
Periodic Table of Videos
Created by video journalist Brady Haran working with chemists at The University of Nottingham.
