Friday May 20th the first annual European Rare Earth Roundtable, hosted by Adamas Intelligence and the Technology, Rare and Electronic Materials (TREM) Center.

China still produces the vast majority of the world's rare earths. What if the country were to cut off supplies to the rest of the world? Ann Bridges attempts to shine a light on the importance of a secure rare earth supply using fiction.

There are 17 rare earth elements (REEs) in all — 15 lanthanides plus yttrium and scandium. It’s a fairly diverse group, with each element having different applications, pricing and available supply, but for the sake of brevity, REEs sometimes get put in the same basket when talking about the market.

Large changes are coming for the global production of rare earths as China announced on Tuesday (October 18th) its plans to limit annual mining.

Raw materials

Sapphire is a form of Aluminum Oxide, one of nature’s most abundant compounds. In its natural state, Aluminum Oxide (Al2O3) is a white powdery material used extensively as an industrial abrasive.

Sapphire is Famous for its Durability

Your typical glass optics are not cutting it in rough applications.

One popular feature of all thermal spray coatings is their lenticular or lamellar grain structure resulting from the rapid solidification of small globules, flattened from striking a cold surface at high velocities. In the simplest terms possible, thermal spray coating involves heating a material, in powder or wire form, to a molten or semi-molten state.

In this process of the coating material in powder form is melted in a hot plasma flame and propelled on to a prepared substrate surface to form a coating surface. When the spray contacts the prepared surface of a substrate material, the fine molten droplets rapidly solidify forming a coating.