The Russian company Nornickel announced that it is working on developing a new technology to modify the properties of palladium metal, in order to expand its uses in several fields.
"Our company is developing a new technology to modify the properties of palladium metal," said the company's president, Vladimir Potanin, in an interview with the Russian website Vesti. "In the future, we plan to completely modify the crystal lattice of palladium, which will enable us to produce a metal with predetermined properties."
He added: "Our company has learned to use palladium as an alternative to other expensive precious metals, such as platinum and iridium, which contributes to expanding its sales markets and finding new uses for the metals."
Butanin noted that the company has succeeded in controlling the properties of palladium to make it usable in various industrial sectors, and said: "We recently achieved our first major success of its kind, as we shipped the first half-ton of palladium to China for use in the production of fiberglass."
Palladium is considered one of the rare metals that are distinguished by their ability to resist corrosion. It is widely used, like platinum and rhodium, in the field of chemical catalysis, such as its inclusion in the composition of catalytic converters in cars in order to convert harmful gaseous pollutants into gases that are less harmful to the environment. It has many other applications in the field of chemical industries, the electronics industry, and in the fields of medicine and dentistry.
