beryllium | The Elements Unearthed

Posts Tagged ‘beryllium’

Progress Report January 2012

Posted in Weekly Post, tagged beryllium, blog statistics, Chemical Heritage Foundation, history of chemistry, periodic table history, science education, societe de chimie industrielle on January 16, 2012| 1 Comment »

Once each year I like to go over the statistics for this blog in detail to see what posts have been the most popular, which search terms are finding this blog, which videos are most watched, etc. I’m not doing this just for an ego trip, but to be able to report the impact this site is having. I have had some very generous sponsors over the three years this blog has been running, especially the American Section of the Société de Chimie Industrielle (which paid for my fellowship in 2009) and the Chemical Heritage Foundation, which provided such a wealth of resources in its collections on the history of chemistry. It was during the time of my fellowship that this blog really began to find an audience, and it has been growing ever since.

Monthly Stats for the Elements Unearthed Blog

So here is where this blog stands: As of today, there have been a total of 67,620 visits to this site. As seen by the histogram, the number of visits has shown a definite annual pattern consistent with the school year – visits are lower in the summer when school is not in session, rise in August and September, stay high in October and November, dip a bit in December due to Winter Vacation, then rise again in January and February and peak in March, then gradually decrease as the school year winds down in April and May. This same pattern has repeated for the last three school years, but has grown each year. Last year, in the 2010-2011 school year, my best months were slightly above 3000 visits. Now they are topping out above 4000 and I hope they will hit 5000 by March.

Granted, compared to some popular blogs with thousands of hits per day, 5000 per month doesn’t sound like much. However, I am pleased – this is a rather esoteric blog dedicated to the history of chemistry and chemistry education. The yearly pattern shows that I am reaching my intended audience of high school students and teachers. This is also shown by the types of searches that reach my blog.

Although there are always some unrelated search terms that somehow reach my blog (the biggest ones are “Ocean City, New Jersey” and “Punxsatawney Phil” because I visited both places in 2009 and showed some pictures), by far the majority of search terms are related to chemistry and its history or to science education in general. I’ve gone through the search terms and compiled them into categories, mostly so that I can make plans for the future. Here are the top searches that reach this blog: (1) Greek Matter Theories (3473 searches) with Aristotle, Democritus, and Thales being the biggest ones; (2) the Periodic Table of elements (2288); (3) beryllium (1600); (4) Alexandre Beguyer de Chancourtois (1397) – this is a bit surprising, but apparently my animation of his telluric screw periodic system and description of his work is one of the few sites out there about him; (5) the Tintic Mining District (1041); (6) the history of the periodic table (868); (7) science education (862), especially using iPads in science classes; (8) early modern chemistry (822), including Lavoisier, Boyle, Priestley, Dalton, and Newton; (9) alchemy (732), with love potions, Khunrath, Basil Valentine, Zosimos, and Maier the highest; (10) water and wind turbines (618); (11) strange attractors (586) – this is another odd one, since I only mentioned it once, but it was in my most popular post; (12) mercury (554); (13) early technology (514), such as Roman glass, Pliny the Elder, Agricola, Neri, and others; (14) mining in general (455) – such terms as overburden, open pit mine, ball mill, and headframe; and (15) Cripple Creek, Colorado (315).

Top Posts for the Elements Unearthed Blog

The videos that I have created for this project are posted on this blog (under the video tab) and on YouTube. The History of the Periodic Table, featuring Dr. Eric Scerri of UCLA, is my biggest hit so far. All parts of this video have been watched a total of 11,474 times as of 1/7/2012. There are even a few derivative works on YouTube that take parts of my video – a section on Henry Moseley, for example – and combine it with parts of other videos with Bill Nye, etc. I’ve had quite a few comments on how useful this video has been for chemistry teachers out there, and I am very pleased with the results so far. There is also a version with Portuguese subtitles done by a professor in Brazil; I’m not sure how many times that has been seen. My separate video that showed only some animations of the periodic table has been watched 416 times.

The second most popular videos have been the two parts on beryllium – its properties and uses, and how it is mined and refined. It has been watched a total of 3219 times, with the separate video on the geology of beryllium watched itself an additional 153 times. The Discovery of Synthetic Diamonds has been watched 745 times and the demonstration of Glass Blowing 754 times. These have been the most popular videos related to this project.

In conclusion, the most important question is: Have I succeeded in my attempt to bring the history of chemistry and chemistry education to the general public, and specifically to teachers and students? All indications, based on these statistics, are that I am succeeding and that that success is continuing to grow.

The last several posts have been about astronomy and space science education, and although some search terms have reached these posts, not many have. For various reasons, not the least of which is that I want to keep this blog focused on my original intent, I am starting a new blog which should be up and running by Wednesday night on space science education and resources for teachers to use now that we are in the golden age of astronomy. I will be doing quite a bit of education outreach on these topics over the next few years, if all goes well, and they deserve to have their own blog. I will include links here once that is ready to visit. I will post to this new blog once per week on Wednesdays.

The statistics also point out which topics have been most popular, and give me direction on what to post about in the future. In my next post, I will give you a schedule of what I intend to discuss over the next year and a half and when I will have the related videos completed. I will try to post once per week, probably on weekends. I have much more material from my fellowship at the Chemical Heritage Foundation that I haven’t shown or discussed here yet, and I look forward to digging into it all. I have also visited many sites related to mining and refining of the elements which I have only mentioned in passing. It’s time to edit all that footage and photos into videos for this site and YouTube. I expect the next few years to be busy, productive, and rewarding and to reach even more people than I already have.

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The Beryllium Part 2 Video is Done

Posted in Weekly Post, tagged bertrandite, beryl, beryllia, beryllium, beryllium alloys, beryllium ceramics, beryllium safety, brush engineered materials, brush resources, brush wellman, cbd, chemical engineering, chronic beryllium disease, counter-current decantation, delta utah, elmore ohio, mining, periodic table, refining ore, solvent extraction, spor mountains, topaz mountain, utah mines on June 19, 2010| 3 Comments »

The second part of the video on beryllium is now finished. You can watch it here:

This video has literally been 2 1/2 years in the making; my students Amy Zirbes and Nathan Jane videotaped our interview with subject expert Phil Sabey, the Manager of Technology and Quality at the Delta mill, in NOvember, 2007. This video discusses the history of mining beryllium at the mine site in the Spor Mountains of western Utah, including how the bertrandite deposit was discovered, and the land rush that occurred as a result (including an incident involving Maxie Anderson, who was head of Ranchers and the general counsel for Anaconda. Maxie Anderson went on to be one of three men to first cross the Atlantic in a helium balloon in 1978). This video also shows how bertrandite it is mined today by Brush Engineered Materials using open pit mines, then transported and processed at the concentration plant near Delta, Utah. The concentrated beryllium hydroxide is then shipped by rail to Elmore, Ohio for final refining into beryllium metal, alloys, and ceramics products. This episode also discusses Chronic Beryllium Disease, the main health hazard of refining or working with beryllium.

Chronic Beryllium Disease:

Beryllium dust, when in the air in concentrations of greater than 2 micrograms per cubic meter, gets inhaled and irritates the lung alveoli. The body treats it as an invading body, and sends white blood cells which surround the beryllium particle and form small granules called granulomas in the lungs. At this point, a person is said to have sub-clinical CBD or is “sensitized” to beryllium. Most people who are sensitized do not develop clinical CBD, but in about 2-5% of sensitized people, the immune system overreacts and the granulomas build up to where the lungs become stiff and respiratory function is impaired, leading to symptoms similar to pneumonia. There is no cure once CBD has set in, and the eventual result is painful death.

Before the effects of beryllium dust were known, a high number of workers in the beryllium industry were getting sick, especially in certain plants such as the old Brush Wellman plant in Lorain, Ohio. Beryllium in its ores (beryl crystals and bertrandite) is tightly bound to the crystal lattice and is therefore harmless. But refining bertrandite or beryl means that the beryllium is physically and chemically separated from the crystal, resulting in fine beryllium particles getting into the air unless precautions are taken. The effects of beryllium disease were well enough known by the mid-1960s that when the Delta concentration plant was built, safeguards were put in place that reduce beryllium dust to under 0.2 micrograms per cubic meter of air, or less than 10% of the maximum safety levels. Workers also wear respiratory equipment such as facemasks with filters to prevent even that level of dust from entering their lungs. There has not been any incident of chronic beryllium disease in the workers at the Delta plant.

Final beryllium metal, alloys, and ceramics are also fairly safe as the beryllium is part of the metal and not airborne. The danger occurs when these materials are cut, machined, or milled, which allows beryllium particles to get into the air where they can be inhaled. The only way to cure chronic beryllium disease is to avoid it in the first place by preventing beryllium dust from entering the air. Special precautions must therefore be taken in any business that handles beryllium. OSHA has been studying CBD and is likely to be coming out with new and even stricter standards soon.

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Beryllium Part 1 Video is Done

Posted in Weekly Post, tagged aquamarine, bertrandite, beryl, beryllia, beryllium, beryllium copper alloy, beryllonite, brush engieneered materials, brush resources, brush wellman, chrysoberyl, euclase, farallon plate, goshenite, hamgergite, heliodor, james webb space telescope, laramide orogeny, morganite, nevadan orogeny, nuclear moderator, nuclear reactor, phenakite, plate tectonics, red beryl, rocky mountains, sevier orogeny, subduction, thermal stability, x-ray window on May 6, 2010| 2 Comments »

After weeks of editing and tweaking, I have completed the first half (part 1) of the video on Beryllium. This section is on the uses and sources of beryllium, and the geology of the bertrandite deposit of western Utah. The second half will take another week or so (I have quite a few tight deadlines on client projects that must be completed right now) and will include the history of mining, current mining operations, refining, and hazards. Here is Part 1:

Beryllium Part 1

I am including here the script for the section on sources of beryllium:

Sources of Beryllium

Beryllium is the first member of the alkaline earth family of elements, which means that it’s highly reactive and easily bonds to form compounds but is difficult to separate into a pure metal. Beryllium was discovered by Louis-Nicolas Vauquelin in 1798 as a component of beryl and in emeralds. Friedrich Wöhler and Antoine Bussy independently isolated the metal in 1828 by reacting potassium with beryllium chloride. Beryllium’s chemical similarity to aluminum was probably why beryllium was missed in previous searches. We now know that beryllium is found in only a few minerals, including the beryl family and bertrandite.

Emerald necklace in the National Museum of Natural History

Beryl is a hexagonal crystal of beryllium aluminum cyclosilicate that can have various colors depending on impurities. Trace amounts of chromium or sometimes vanadium give it a deep green color; when crystallized slowly into a transparent crystal, it is called emerald. Emeralds have been prized as gemstones for thousands of years; today, the main source of emeralds is Columbia in South America.

Heliodor and Aquamarine at the National Museum of Natural History

Trace amounts of iron (II) ions produce a blue-green variety of beryl called aquamarine. Small amounts of iron (III) ions produce shades of beryl from golden yellow to greenish yellow called heliodor. Manganese (II) impurities produce pink beryl called morganite. Completely pure beryl is colorless and is called goshenite.

Morganite and Heliodor

The rarest form of beryl is red beryl, mined only in the Wah Wah Mountains of southwestern Utah. It gets its color from traces of manganese (III) and is a deeper red than morganite. In addition to these gem varieties of beryl, there is non-gem beryl, which is opaque and considered semi-precious. It is chiefly mined in Brazil in the Minas Gerais District although some deposits exist in Colorado and New England as well; it is New Hampshire’s state mineral. A large specimen 5.5 meters by 1.2 meters was found in a quarry in Maine, and the largest crystal ever found is a beryl crystal from Madagascar that is 18 meters long and 3.5 meters in diameter.

Red Beryl and Emerald, from the collection of Keith and Mauna Proctor

Bertrandite, on the other hand, is a pinkish mineral consisting of hydrous beryllium oxide silicate that doesn’t form very large crystals. It tends to be found clinging to grains of igneous pegmatites such as granite. The bertrandite in the Spor Mountains of western Utah is found in highly altered rhyolite and is the only deposit large enough and concentrated enough to mine commercially. It is the sole source of beryllium for all of the United States.

Bertrandite and Beryl, on display at Brush Resources Delta Plant

Beryllium is also found in a few other rare minerals, such as chrysoberyl (beryllium aluminum oxide), phenakite (beryllium silicate), euclase (hydrous beryllium aluminum silicate), hambergite (hydrous beryllium borate), and beryllonite (sodium beryllium phosphate).

Phenakite, Euclase, Hambergite, and Beryllonite

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Refining Beryllium Ore

Posted in Weekly Post, tagged alkaline earth, bertrandite, beryl, beryllia, beryllium, chemical engineering, counter-current decantation, element, frit, mining, organic solvent, refining, rotary kiln, sulfation on April 14, 2010| 6 Comments »

Topaz-Spor Mt. area

I am continuing this series of posts on the sources, mining, and refining of beryllium ore. I am in the middle of editing the interview my students did in Dec., 2007 of Phil Sabey at the Brush Resources’ Delta Concentration Mill and will have the final videos done by next week. Today I’ve been creating a series of Flash animations showing the geologic history of the Spor Mountain area where the bertrandite deposits are located. Today’s post will be on the refining process used at the Delta Mill to concentrate the bertrandite and beryl ore into beryllium hydroxide.

Fluorspar with Bertrandite

Refining Beryllium Ore

With only 0.65 % beryllium oxide (or 4.5 lbs. per ton of beryllium) in the final ore, a process had to be engineered to economically concentrate the beryllium for final processing. The properties that make beryllium useful also make it difficult to extract from its ores. Robert Maddox, Howard Gimperline, Jack Valliquet, Richard Shank, and other chemical engineers at Brush Wellman’s plant in Elmore, Ohio in the early 1960’s devised a unique solvent extraction process. With refinements, the process was seen to be economical and the go-ahead was given to build a concentration plant as close to the mine and to railroad transportation and a good water source as possible. In Dec., 1967 a groundbreaking ceremony was held at the mine and in April, 1968 a ceremony was also held at the mill site north of Delta, Utah. By the end of 1969, the plant was producing its first beryllium hydroxide concentrate.

Process for Refining Bertrandite Ore

The solvent extraction process removes the beryllium by first crushing and wet grinding the ore in a ball mill, then leaching it with sulfuric acid and steam in rotating tanks at 95 ° C to dissolve the beryllium. Thickening agents are added which help to settle the sludge in a series of flotation tanks while leaving the beryllium sulfate in solution. The sludge is stirred by counter current decantation and pumped from tank to tank as the dissolved beryllium sulfate is washed over the side to continue the process. The remaining sludge is finally discarded to a tailings pile.

Sulfuric Acid and Steam are added to the bertrandite to dissolve the beryllium

The beryllium is then separated from the sulfate using an organic compound, then stripped from the organic by ammonium carbonate. Impurities of iron and aluminum are removed through steam hydrolysis, which leaves the beryllium in the form of beryllium hydroxide, which is vacuum drum filtered. Since beryllium dust is toxic, this entire process must be done in a sealed system, including the final packaging of the beryllium hydroxide into blue drums for shipment.

Panorama of the Brush Resources Beryllium Plant

There are a lot of impurities in the bertrandite ore; some that gave problems early on were the high sodium content, the high uranium content, and the zirconium. The leftover filtrate still has appreciable quantities of uranium, so it is pumped to evaporation ponds, then shipped elsewhere for final uranium processing.

Beryl Crystals Ready for Refining

Once it was proven that this process could compete economically with the beryl extraction process already being used, the go-ahead was given to build the Utah processing plant. A site was selected near the Union Pacific railroad tracks and the Sevier River north of Delta and south of Lynndyl in west central Utah. The plant was completed in 1969 and began processing ore that had already been mined and stockpiled. Brush Wellman was awarded the prestigious J. C. Vaalor Award for Chemical Engineering in 1970 for the implementation of this process. In 1978, an addition was built on the plant to allow the processing of beryl ore, making the Delta plant the only facility in the United States that processes either form of beryllium ore. When beryllium was identified by the U. S. government as a strategic metal for its critical uses in the aerospace industry, beryl ore was purchased from mines in Brazil and stockpiled. Brush Resources has now purchased this strategic stockpile and is extracting the beryllium from it.

Pouring Molten Beryl Frit

To recover beryllium from beryl crystals, the crystals must first be destroyed, since the beryllium is tightly bound in the beryl crystal lattice. The beryl is melted at 1700 ° C in a furnace, then quenched rapidly in water to break the crystal lattice and turn the beryllium particles into a frit, with the non-beryllium materials removed as slag. The frit is heat-treated at 1000 ° C in a rotary kiln, ground up in a ball mill, and leached with steam and sulfuric acid at 325 ° C in a rotating drum to dissolve the beryllium. This solution is added to the bertrandite solution in the flotation tanks to continue the process. In 1980, additional flotation tanks were added to accommodate the beryl solution.

Heat treater kiln

All of these processes require careful control and monitoring to improve yields and ensure safety. Using a Continuous Improvement Process, the Delta plant has added computer automation controls and improved laboratory analysis. New flocculent agents and organic solvents have improved the extraction yields, and the plant now processes ore at a 99% efficiency level. Around 400 tons of bertrandite and about 10 tons of beryl ore can be processed per day at the Delta plant.

Special thanks go to Phil Sabey for the tour of the Brush Resources plant and for providing the brochures, Powerpoint presentations, and photos upon which this post is based.

Phil Sabey in Analysis Lab

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Mining Beryllium

Posted in Weekly Post, tagged anaconda, bertrandite, beryl, beryllia, beryllium, beryllium alloys, berylometer, brush resources, brush wellman, fluorite, fluorspar, mining, open pit mine, spor mountains, topaz mountain, western Utah on April 7, 2010| 2 Comments »

The next videos that will be completed for the Elements Unearthed Project are two episodes on the sources, mining, refining, and uses of beryllium. I’ve written a few posts previously about this topic, and as I continue to organize and prepare materials to use in the videos (which will be edited over the next week), I have created several diagrams that describe the process used for surveying and developing open pit mines at the Brush Resources’ Spor Mt. mine site in western Utah. You might say, “Beryllium? Why should I care about some rare metal that I’ll never use in my lifetime?” But you’d be surprised. You are already using beryllium (for example, the electrical contacts inside the automatic windows of your car use a beryllium-copper alloy because it can handle frequent changes in heat and resists corrosion better than many other alloys). Beryllium is also an essential metal for medical, nuclear power, and aerospace applications. I’ll discuss more of beryllium’s uses and its refining and sources in a later post, but in this post let’s talk about how the bertrandite ore is mined.

Location of Bertrandite in Western Utah

Mining Operations at Brush Resources

The bertrandite ore found in the Spor Mts. is very similar to clay (an aluminum silicate) and looks like common dirt except it has a slight pinkish color. It’s also associated with fluorspar or fluorite, which is often a deep blue to violet color. One is tempted to think the more colorful fluorite is the mineral we want, but it’s actually the crumbly pink coating found on the fluorite nodules. Elsewhere in the Spor Mts., the fluorite has been mined commercially.

The first attempt at mining the bertrandite ore was started by Anaconda on their claim. They tried hard rock mining, but the soft altered rhyolite of the ore body proved too dangerous to mine that way. One day, while the miners were all having lunch, the mine caved in. Fortunately no one was hurt, but it was determined then that the only safe method was open pit mining.

Exploratory core drilling

Potential mine sites are surveyed by drilling core samples every 100 feet to map out the general location of the ore bodies. The bertrandite deposits in the Spor Mts. are located in a mineralized zone of altered rhyolite tuff that overlies a bedrock of limestone. This soft and crumbly altered layer is overlaid by a tough, hard layer of unaltered rhyolite with about the same composition and hardness of granite. All of this is further overlaid by a layer of gravel, loose rock, and sand deposited by Lake Bonneville during the last ice age. Since the ore body is tilted, it occasionally reaches the surface (where it was originally discovered) and in other places dips so far below ground as to be unfeasible to mine. Several mine sites, such as the Blue Chalk and Roadside I sites have already been mined, but enough reserves have been mapped to last at least 50 more years at current production levels.

Planning an Open Pit Mine

Once the location of the ore body has been generally mapped out, mining engineers plan out an open pit structure that will reach the ore with the least disturbance to the overlying layers while keeping the sides of the pit terraced to safely prevent rockslides and excessive erosion. Once the plan is approved, a contractor is hired to remove the overburden, usually in the winter and spring months. The loose alluvial gravel and soil is removed first and set aside for later reclamation. The hard rhyolite is blasted and removed, and the altered rhyolite layer is also removed to within about seven feet of the bertrandite ore.

Removing the Overburden

A second phase of core drilling is carried out, with holes every 25 feet to more accurately map out the exact ore locations. For a typical ore body, between 40 and 60,000 cores are drilled and sampled every two feet. 3D structural maps are prepared to identify where various grades of ore are located. The ore is then removed carefully; a technician with a portable field berylometer walks before the bulldozer and stakes out the locations of the ore grades that are being removed; a self-loading scraper scoops up the ore and moves it to stockpiles where it is sorted by grade into the same pile. The ore is then transported by 18-wheeler to the processing plant near Delta, Utah, about 50 miles southeast. High-grade ore is mixed with low-grade ore so that all the bertrandite coming to the plant has about the same percentage of beryllium. The final ore has less than .65% beryllium, or about four pounds per ton.

Next Post: Refining Beryllium Ore

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Recovering from the Conference

Posted in Weekly Post, tagged beryllium, bingham canyon, copper mine, copper refining, copper smelting, hobble creek canyon, juab valley, kennecott, magna, mt nebo, nsta conference, oquirrh, rio tinto, smelter, utah lake, wasatch on March 26, 2010| Leave a Comment »

Southern Wasatch Mtns. from Maple Mt. to Mt. Nebo

I’ve been home from the NSTA conference for close to a week now. I’ve spent much of that time recovering and getting myself back on track. My shoulders have been sore all week from packing my laptop around the convention center and also packing around all the materials I got loaded down with at the booths. I also picked up a head cold (seems like every time I travel by air, this happens). I’ve since been following up on leads that I got at the conference, such as applying for grants I heard of, checking out opportunities, trying out new forms of Web 2.0 technologies, etc. Today I’m finally getting back to editing videos with the episodes on beryllium refining next up.

Utah Lake, West Mt., and Juab Valley

The trip back was uneventful. I ran into quite a few teachers in the airport taking my same flight from Philly to Salt Lake City. Some were from Utah, others from Reno or Phoenix or other connecting flights. I spent much of the flight napping or watching remastered Star Trek episodes (you really should check out the remastered “Doomsday Machine” episode – the planet killer finally looks like the “devil incarnate” that Com. Decker describes it to be). As we approached Salt Lake City, I saw the Wasatch Mountains ahead and I had a good view of the southern Wasatch down to Mt. Nebo as we flew over Hobble Creek Canyon, then turned over Utah Lake and headed north along the Oquirrh Mts. I could see that we would be in perfect position for photos of the Bingham Canyon Copper Mine (the biggest hole on Earth) so I snapped quite a few photos just as the sun set over the Deep Creek Mts. on the Utah-Nevada border. At some point, I hope to have some team(s) from Copper Hills High School or Bingham High School do episodes on the history and current operations of the Kennecott mine (now owned by Rio Tinto). I’ve been to the mine and through the concentration plant before, and it’s quite a process. Once the ore is crushed in ball mills, the copper is floated to the top of settling tanks using a floculent agent, then pumped to the smelter at Magna (where the large smokestack is just north of the Oquirrhs along I-80). There it is melted and poured into ingots for electrolytic purification. In addition to huge amounts of copper produced each year, they also produce zinc, molybdenum, and even 30,000 oz. of gold. Since the ore is less than 1% usable metals, it takes a gigantic operation for the economics of scale to be profitable.

Bingham Canyon copper mine and Oquirrh Mts.

My goal over the next several months is to produce as many new video episodes as possible. Already the Periodic Table episodes have been viewed about 500 times between this blog and YouTube. I am also planning to post them onto Teacher Tube, but the file sizes have to be <100 MB, which will mean high compression. I even had a request from a professor in Brazil to allow him to translate the videos into Portuguese. Once I have about five topics done, I’ll set up a dedicated website so that I can create an iTunes podcast series as well. Here is a list of topics for the next few months, in the approximate order in which I will complete them, hopefully at the rate of about two topics per month (with two episodes per topic, or about one episode per week):

Bingham Canyon copper mine

Beryllium mining and refining

Glass Blowing (History and Process, Art and Science)

Greek Matter Theories (Three parts: The Pre-Socratics, the Atomists, and Aristotle and Beyond)

Cement Making

Synthetic Diamonds (History and Discovery, Process and Uses)

Stained Glass (History and Process, Art and Science)

Properties of the Elements (featuring an interview with Theo Gray)

The Tintic Mining District of Utah (Three episodes: History, Life in a Mining Town, and Current Issues and Challenges)

Anthracite coal mining (The Lackawanna Coal Mine and Anthracite Coal Museum near Scranton, PA)

The Story of Centralia (visit to Centralia, PA)

Zinc Mining (Tour of the Sterling Hill Zinc Mine, Ogdensburg, NJ)

Lead Mining in Missouri (Tours of the Bonne Terre lead mine and the Missouri Lead Mining Museum)

The First Oil Well (tour of the Drake Oil Well in Titusville, PA)

Oil Wells and Refining in Kansas (the Kansas State Oil Museum in El Dorado)

Salt Mining in Kansas (the Kansas Underground Salt Mine in Hutchinson)

Early Alchemy (based on research conducted at the Chemical Heritage Museum last summer – focusing on Zosimos of Panoplis and Arabic alchemists)

Alchemy in the Middle Ages (all the supposed masters, including Ramon Lull, Roger Bacon, Paracelsus, Flamel, and many others)

Metallurgy and Mining in the Middle Ages (based on books by Birringuccio, Neri, Agricola, etc.)

The Rise of Chymistry (the origins of chemistry as a science in the works of Sennert, Boyle, Lavoisier, Dalton, and others)

Sources of the Elements (tours of the mineral exhibits at the Natural History Museum in Wash., D.C. and elsewhere)

Magna copper smelter and salt evaporation ponds

At the rate of two topics per month (which is pretty ambitious) it will take at least ten months to complete all these topics, or maybe by the end of 2010. I have much of the media (videotaped tours, photos, etc.) that I need for these topics already, it’s just a matter of creating the scripts, narration, and doing the editing. Once summer comes, I’ll be out gathering more information on other mining sites and adding to what I already have on these topics. By fall (pending funding) there will be additional teams of students out collecting more material. My overall goal (if you look at the post from November where I submitted the grant to NSF) is to produce over 100 episodes by the end of 2012, and by then to be covering Utah, Nevada, and Colorado. Sometimes I look at the mountain of work I have before me, then I think of how much the Periodic Table videos are already being used and realize the potential this project has. I also remember that the Bingham Canyon copper mine began as a mountain, too, and now it’s a gigantic hole. It’s only taken 100 years of constant digging . . . .

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A Beryllium Sphere

Posted in Weekly Post, tagged bertrandite, beryl crystals, beryllia, beryllium, brush engineered materials, brush wellman, delta concentration plant, galaxy quest, great basin museum, gyroscope, james webb space telescope, open pit mining, saturn rocket, saturn v on January 7, 2010| 3 Comments »

Beryllium mount for Trident missile gyroscope

This will seem to be a sudden diversion after my last post on Periodic Tables, but I am working on several video episodes at the same time and these posts will be jumping between topics depending on where I am with each one. This last Tuesday I had the opportunity to visit my home town of Deseret, Utah with several distant Black cousins on a genealogy trip, and we stopped at the Great Basin Museum in Delta to look up some old ledgers. While I was there, I took the opportunity to photograph their exhibit on the refining and uses of beryllium. It might seem strange that the best exhibit on beryllium isn’t in the Smithsonian Natural History Museum in Washington, D.C. but is instead in a small, local museum in Delta, Utah. However, the only commercial source of beryllium ore (bertrandite) is located in the Spor Mts. of western Utah and partially refined at the Brush Engineered Materials concentration plant near Delta. I took a group of students to the plant in Dec., 2007 and videotaped Phil Sabey describing the refining process and history of the plant. He also took us on an excellent tour of the plant. My students did much of the initial editing of the footage that year, but I haven’t put the finishing touches on it yet because I needed more photos of how beryllium is used. This exhibit had exactly what I needed, and I can finally finish the beryllium episodes.

Gyroscope platform for Saturn V rocket

Beryllium has unique properties that make it ideally suited for many aerospace applications. It is a very hard, tough metal but also extremely lightweight: a 36 pound piece of steel would only weigh about 8 pounds if made from beryllium. When you hold a piece of it, you’d swear it was actually plastic. Because of this, it has been used for guidance and gyroscope systems in many missiles, including the Saturn V rockets that lifted the Apollo astronauts to the moon. Here is a photo of a gyroscope platform used for the Saturn V: this one has a flaw and therefore wasn’t used in the Apollo program and was donated to the museum. It reminds me of the scene in the movie “Galaxy Quest” where TIm Allen and his crew of actors have to land on a planet to retrieve a beryllium sphere to replace the cracked one in their engine room (the scene, incidentally, was filmed at Goblin Valley in Utah). So this gyroscope platform is a true beryllium sphere . . . .

Beryllium is also transparent to X-rays and therefore ideal for use in X-ray tubes, and it is a neutron absorber and therefore useful in nuclear applications. In addition, beryllium copper alloy resists corrosion while being an excellent conductor of electricity and is used for electrical contacts and connectors where extremes of temperature and high corrosion can be expected, such as in the automatic windows of many car doors.

Beryllium copper alloy

It is being used as housings for laser repeaters for transoceanic fiber optic cables where the lasers are used to amplify the optical signal. One of the most recent uses has been for the mirrors in the James Webb Space Telescope – its high reflectivity and light weight make beryllium use ideal.

Beryl crystals and bertrandite/fluorite nodules

Beryllium is refined from two commercial minerals. Traditionally, it was concentrated from beryl crystals that were crushed and melted. The Delta plant has one feed stream that does that, and they are currently using up the strategic stockpile of beryl crystals which were purchased from the U.S. government. Beryl is actually an impure form of emerald; one could isolate beryllium from emerald or red beryl, too, but it wouldn’t be exactly cost effective. The beryl crystals on display in the Great Basin Museum come mostly from small family mines in South America and show the usual hexagonal crystal structure. The red beryl is much more rare and comes from a mine in the Wah Wah Mts. near Milford, Utah.

Red beryl crystals from the Wah Wah Mts.

The other feed stream at the Delta plant concentrates the bertrandite ore, which is a hydrous beryllium aluminum silicate with traces of uranium and other elements. In the Spor Mts., it is found as a highly weathered pinkish clay material with frequent nodules of fluorite and some beautiful purple fluorite geodes as seen here.

Bertrandite ore

All of this is crushed, separated with sufluric acid, and an organic floculent is added to float the beryllium particles to the top in a series of flotation tanks (seen to the upper left in this aerial shot).

Delta beryllium concentration plant

The beryllium concentrate is then pumped off the top of the tanks, the floculent agent is stripped, and the beryllium passed through several chemical processes to concentrate it into beryllium hydroxide pellets, which must be handled in an airtight system since at this point beryllium becomes very toxic. The pellets are shipped to Elmore, Ohio for final refining into beryllium metal, beryllium alloys, and beryllia ceramic products. I stopped at Elmore on my way to Philadelphia this summer and took this photo of the Elmore plant.

Brush Wellman plant in Elmore, Ohio

Because of its highly weathered nature, the bertrandite can’t be mined except through open pits. The Blue Chalk and Roadside deposits, as shown on this map, are currently being mined; there are enough deposits to provide beryllium for anticipated needs for at least the next 20 years. To aid in the mining and to lessen the amount of overburden that must be removed, the deposits are carefully drilled and mapped out in 3D.

Bertrandite deposits in Spor Mts.

I am working on completing two video episodes on beryllium mining and concentration by mid-January and post them to iTunes (finally!). These photos complete all the materials I’ve been collecting, so now all it needs is final editing. Along with the beryllium episodes, I’ll post two on the Periodic Table, one each on the history of glass blowing and stained glass, and the full video of the rationale for this project (I posted that in two parts to this blog several weeks ago). My goal is to post episodes once each month through June. They will include episodes on Greek matter theories, alchemy and technology in the Middle Ages, zinc mining in New Jersey, anthracite coal mining in Pennsylvania, lead mining in Missouri, petroleum mining and refining in Pennsylvania and Kansas, and salt mining in Kansas. These are all mine sites that I visited on my way back from Philadelphia. I have the video and photos, but it’s the editing that takes time. I’m also working on four projects for clients – as expected, everything heated up after New Years. I would love to have enough grant funding to work on The Elements Unearthed full time, but, alas, I must make a living and so this project can only be done here and there as I have time between client projects.

My thanks go to Phil Sabey of Brush Engineered Materials for our interview and tour back in 2007 and to Roger Anderson of the Great Basin Museum for helping me photograph the exhibit.

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On My Way to Philadelphia

Posted in Weekly Post, tagged beryllium, brush wellman, Chemical Heritage Foundation, hydroelectric, oil refinery, sinclair oil, sustainable energy, wind power, wind turbine on June 2, 2009| Leave a Comment »

As mentioned in my last post, I am leaving Mountainland Applied Technology College and will be taking up a Fellowship at the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia. I have been selected to be the Societe de Chimie Industrielle (American Section) Fellow for 2008-09 at CHF, where I will be studying the history of atomic theory, chemistry’s development as a science out of alchemy, and the types of labware and equipment used during the Middle Ages and later. I’ll discuss more about how this fellowship fits into the larger project in future posts, but in this one I’d like to give a final report on Phase I of the Elements Unearthed project as well as describe my four-day drive across the country from Orem, Utah to Philadelphia, PA.

My students at MATC have completed as much of their projects as was possible before the end of the school year. They are all in a rough cut format, with only the audio tracks laid in in some spots (narration only or audio from our wireless microphone system). In other places, we have video as well but it needs to be color balanced. Other spots have some images but so far the cuts are rough and the story is also. We showed these rough edits in an Alpha test before other students at MATC and had them fill out evaluation forms. Most of the comments were that they liked the information and presentation so far, but that they were too long, a bit dry, and needed more images and animations. This is to be expected when the rough cut for the blown glass project, for example, is 43 mintues long not counting credits. It is my goal to cut it down to two podcast episodes under 15 minutes each, so roughtly 1/3 of the material must go while keeping the storyline intact and improving the video, audio, and imagery. That will be part of my work this summer, to prepare these segments for Beta testing and final deployment on this blog and to iTunes, YouTube, etc.

Overall the students did very well, learning not only how to plan and execute a video shoot, but also how to research and structure a documentary-style video, how to capture and transcribe the footage, and how to edit the footage using Final Cut Pro. If we had more time, they would have continued the process through beta test, whereupon I would have taken over for final editing. But the year is done, the Media Design Technology program at MATC is now cancelled, and I am in Philadelphia.

Sunset on Lake Erie

It has been quite a trip. I had four days to make it to Philly, leaving at 9:00 a.m. on Thursday, May 28 and averaging about 550 miles per day. That’s about nine hours of driving each day, and I am certainly feeling the effects of it now. I took I-80 most of the way, only moving over to I-76 at Youngstown, Ohio. Fortunately the trip went by without major incident. The only bad thing was that one of my contact lenses decided to pop out at about mile marker 80 in Illinois. I pulled over onto the next exit and searched around for 20 mintues before finally finding it. I stayed the first night at Little Thunder Campground on Lake McConaughy, NE; the second night in a motel in northern Davenport, Iowa; and the third night at East Harbor State Park at the tip of Sandusky Pennisula on Lake Erie in Ohio. I had planned out these stops carefully in advance (Google is wonderful!) and everthing worked out – I arrived at the Drexelbrook Apartments in Drexel Hill, PA at 4:30 eastern time on Sunday, May 31, just in time to sign the rental contract. My wife and children will be flying in today.

Marblehead Lighthouse, Sandusky Penninsula

Even though I was driving, I wasn’t taking a vacation from this project. I took a few detours and took a lot of photos both of scenery and of things related to the Elements Unearthed. One thing I noticed was how energy production technology is such a large part of our landscape. Near Rawlins, Wyoming, for example, is the large Sinclair oil refinery shown here. Lake McConaughy in Nebraska is not only an irrigation lake but generates hydroelectric power. It is becoming all too apparent that neither of these technologies can sustain our energy needs – the sites for hydroelectric power have pretty much been maximized already and crude oil has already passed the point of peak production in the last several years. We are running out of crude oil, and the prices will only escalate until we are well past the high price point of last summer. The average price I found crossing the country was about $2.50 per gallon, and it won’t get better.

Sinclair oil refinery near Rawlins, Wyoming

On an encouraging note, I noticed a huge increase in wind powered generators. New wind turbines are sprouting up all along I-80 and more are being constructed; I saw new turbine blades on the backs of several 18-wheelers as I traveled. There was a new wind farm just west of Evanston, Wyoming and groups of turbines here and there across Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. Certainly wind is a largely untapped resource, and with new composite materials the turbines can last much longer and generate more power than the first generation of turbines that were installed in the late 1970s.

Wind turbines near Evanston, Wyoming

Another stop I made was at Elmore, Ohio where Brush Wellman’s Engineered Materials Division operates a plant that refines beryllium hydroxide pellets into final beryllium metal and alloys. The pellets themselves come from the concentration plant near Delta, Utah which my students have already documented (you’ll see the final result by the end of August). Coincidentally, U. S. Highway 6 runs through both towns, and coincides with I-80 for some of its length. It was good to finally get some decent photos of the Elmore plant to add to the beryllium project.

Now that I am at CHF, I will begin pulling together all the images and other media that I can to tell the background history of the elements – something that my students couldn’t do very easily because there aren’t comtemporary sources or sites that we could go to and film. So this part of the project has to be done by me. Questions I hope to answer are how the Greeks first proposed the ideas of elements and atoms and how these ideas developed through history. I also hope to digitize illustrations and portraits of laboratories and equipment, with the goal of re-creating this equipment in 3D, perhaps even re-building historical laboratories such as those of Lavoisier or Priestley. I hade my orientation yesterday (June 1) and today I will start my researches in earnest.

Brush Wellman beryllium refinery, Elmore, Ohio

In my next entry, I wll describe CHF and its parts and functions and the resources that are available here. I am already finding it to be an incredible place for anyone that has a passion about the history of science.

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The Elements Unearthed

Our Discovery and Usage of the Chemical Elements

Posts Tagged ‘beryllium’

Progress Report January 2012

The Beryllium Part 2 Video is Done

Beryllium Part 1 Video is Done

Refining Beryllium Ore

Mining Beryllium

Recovering from the Conference

A Beryllium Sphere

On My Way to Philadelphia

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