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New refractory metal capacitors for fast laptops

The taming of niobium

Smelting furnace: Sascha Böhnke prepares to reduce niobium dioxide to elementary niobium, a process that takes place at temperatures of around 1,000 degrees Celsius.

Niobium mill: Axel Krämer controls the crushing-grinding-sifting step for the niobium dioxide.

Researchers at Bayer's subsidiary H.C. Starck have succeeded in taming the refractory metal niobium for the production of high-performance but nonetheless inexpensive capacitors like those that are widely used in laptops, mobile phones and game consoles. By employing a variety of tricks and concentrating energies, the team is now in a position to extract niobium from the ore in a previously unattained level of purity.

Pure refractory metal in powder form

Until now, niobium's career as a material for the manufacture of capacitors has been hindered by inadequate purity and an unsuitable powder morphology. Using a highly complex new process, H.C. Starck in Goslar is now able to extract both niobium and tantalum with a very high level of purity. Every month, the company manufactures tons of ultra-high-grade niobium powder with special morphologies at its pilot plant and supplies it to capacitor producers so that they can carry out extensive field tests. The first pieces of equipment such as laptops, PDAs, cellphones and game consoles have already been equipped with the new capacitors and a large-scale plant for niobium production is now at the planning stage. Interesting facts about the process and other fields of application for the tamed refractory metal can be found in the following article (PDF file).