Platinum Metals Review - Volume 12, Issue 3, 1968

Carbon content is the controlling factor in operating a steel-making furnace, and fast and accurate carbon determinations can yield fuel and time savings that lower production costs. This article describes an expendable device incorporating a platinum: rhodium-platinum thermocouple which gives carbon contents extremely rapidly by thermal arrest point determination.

The design of high temperature furnaces incorporating internally wound 20 per cent rhodium-platinum heating elements has been developed and improved over many years at the Building Research Station. The type of construction described here permits a higher furnace temperature to be obtained for a given winding temperature than is possible with other constructions, and yet enables good working lives to be achieved.

At the joint annual meeting of The Chemical Society, The Institute of Chemistry of Ireland and the Royal Institute of Chemistry held in Dublin in April, one of the symposia was on ‘Recent Progress in Organometallic Chemistry’. Several of the plenary lectures and contributed papers given at this symposium were concerned with the chemistry of the platinum metals, and these are summarised and reviewed here.

Under normal conditions platinum-clad molybdenum equipment used in the glass industry eventually fails because of a vapour phase reaction in which molybdenum is transferred to the platinum envelope across a partly evacuated void. In this article, based on a paper recently delivered at the joint meeting of the British Ceramic Society and the Society of Glass Technology in Sheffield in April, it is shown that metal transfer can be largely inhibited by keeping the partial pressure of oxygen in the interfacial volume at a very low level, and practical methods of achieving this objective are discussed.

Of the one hundred or so elements in the Periodic Table no less than seventy-five are metals, but of these only the twelve in Groups VIII and IB have important catalytic properties. The marked changes in these properties on proceeding either vertically or horizontally through the groups is discussed in terms of the periodic variation of the solid-state properties of the metals.