History of nickel

Nickel plays an important role in the development of human material civilization. Due to the close melting points of nickel and iron, nickel was mistaken for good iron by the ancients. In ancient times, people from China, Egypt, and Babylon have used utensils with high nickel content to make artifacts, and because nickel does not rust, it was also regarded as silver by Peruvian indigenous people. As early as 235 BC, China began to use nickel minerals to make coins, while copper, copper-nickel alloy, was invented and used by Chinese ancients in 200 BC. In 1751, Alex Fredrik Cronstedt of Stockholm worked on a new metal called NiAs. He thought it contained copper, but he extracted a new metal and announced it in 1754 and named it nickel.

During the extraction process, the alloys of metallic cobalt, arsenic, and copper all appeared as trace pollutants and were mistakenly recognized by many chemists. It was not until 1775 that pure nickel was made by Torbern Bergman. . In 1952, there were reports of nickel in animals, and later it was suggested that nickel is an essential trace element for mammals. Research on nutrition and metabolism of nickel has been carried out since 1975.

Development of the nickel industry

In recent years, the production and consumption of nickel in the world has been relatively stable. The supply and demand situation of the nickel market in the world has mainly changed with the development and change of the stainless steel industry. , High-grade ferronickel output has been greatly improved. The major nickel ore resource countries are Russia, Canada, New Caledonia, Indonesia, Australia and Cuba. The total output and export of nickel nickel account for about 80% of the world's total.

Smelting of nickel is concentrated in Russia, Japan, Canada, Australia, Norway, China, New Caledonia, the United Kingdom, South Africa and Finland.

The major nickel consumer countries and major producers of stainless steel are Japan, the United States, Germany, Russia, Italy, France and South Korea. Among the major nickel consuming countries, only Russia is a nickel resource country, and the remaining consumer countries have almost no nickel ore available for mining, and mainly rely on imported nickel concentrates and other primary nickel products. The constant consumption of nickel resources and the continuous reduction of resource reserves. Finding and rationally mining new nickel ore and increasing the development of nickel resource recycling industries have become important tasks for the development of the current nickel industry.

China is currently the world's largest producer and consumer of ferronickel. With the continuous development of the economy and the iron and steel industry, the demand for nickel resources continues to increase, but at the same time, the output of nickel ore is also increasing, gradually causing the current global nickel The severe pattern of city oversupply. In domestic stainless steel production, the use of ferronickel as a raw material for production will increase year by year, and the use of pure nickel will decline. At the same time as the nickel industry in China continues to develop, problems have also arisen. For example, nickel mines are mostly low-grade, with low open-mining ratios, less recoverable reserves, relatively backward mining and smelting technologies, and advanced technologies in the world. There is still a large gap, and the cost of mining and smelting remains high, which shows that China's nickel industry still has a lot of room for development.

Alternatives to nickel

In the building materials industry, austenitic stainless steel is replacing the original low nickel, double chromium or ultra high chromium stainless steel. Some nickel-free special steels are sometimes used to replace nickel-containing stainless steels in the power and petrochemical industries. Titanium alloy can replace metal nickel or nickel alloy and is used in corrosive chemical environment. Lithium batteries have replaced nickel batteries in some devices.