Rhenium is a chemical element; it has symbol Re and atomic number 75. It is a silvery-gray, heavy, third-row transition metal in group 7 of the periodic table. With an estimated average concentration of 1 part per billion (ppb), rhenium is one of the rarest elements in the Earth's crust. It has one of the highest melting and boiling points of any element. It resembles manganese and technetium chemically and is mainly obtained as a by-product of the extraction and refinement of molybdenum and copper ores. It can assume a wide variety of oxidation states ranging from −3 to +7. Rhenium was originally discovered in 1908 by Masataka Ogawa, but he mistakenly assigned it as element 43 (now known as technetium) rather than element 75 and named it nipponium. It was rediscovered in 1925 by Walter Noddack, Ida Tacke and Otto Berg, who gave it its present name. It was named after the river Rhine in Europe, from which the earliest samples had been obtained and worked commercially. Nickel-based superalloys of rhenium are used in combustion chambers, turbine blades, and exhaust nozzles of jet engines. These alloys contain up to 6 % rhenium, making jet engine construction the largest single use for the element. The second-most important use is as a catalyst: it is an excellent catalyst for hydrogenation and isomerization, and is used for example in catalytic reforming of naphtha for use in gasoline (rheniforming process). Because of the low availability relative to demand, rhenium is expensive, with price reaching an all-time high in 2008–09 of US$10,600 per kilogram (US$4,800 per pound). As of 2018, its price had dropped to US$2,844 per kilogram (US$1,290 per pound) due to increased recycling and a drop in demand for rhenium catalysts.
History
In 1908, Japanese chemist Masataka Ogawa announced that he had discovered the 43rd element and named it nipponium (Np) after Japan (Nippon in Japanese). In fact, he had found element 75 (rhenium) instead of element 43: both elements are in the same group of the periodic table. Ogawa's work was often incorrectly cited, because some of his key results were published only in Japanese; it is likely that his insistence on searching for element 43 prevented him from considering that he might have found element 75 instead. Just before Ogawa's death in 1930, Kenjiro Kimura analysed Ogawa's sample by X-ray spectroscopy at the Imperial University of Tokyo, and said to a friend that "it was beautiful rhenium indeed". He did not reveal this publicly, because under the Japanese university culture before World War II it was frowned upon to point out the mistakes of one's seniors, but the evidence became known to some Japanese news media regardless. As time passed with no repetitions of the experiments or new work on nipponium, Ogawa's claim faded away. The symbol Np was later used for the element neptunium, and the name "nihonium", also named after Japan, along with symbol Nh, was later used for element 113. Element 113 was also discovered by a team of Japanese scientists and was named in respectful homage to Ogawa's work. Today, Ogawa's claim is widely accepted as having been the discovery of element 75 in hindsight. Rhenium (Latin: Rhenus meaning: "Rhine") received its current name when it was rediscovered by Walter Noddack, Ida Noddack, and Otto Berg in Germany. In 1925 they reported that they had detected the element in platinum ore and in the mineral columbite. They also found rhenium in gadolinite and molybdenite. In 1928 they were able to extract 1 g of the element by processing 660 kg of molybdenite. It was estimated in 1968 that 75 % of the rhenium metal in the United States was used for research and the development of refractory metal alloys. It took several years from that point before the superalloys became widely used. The original mischaracterization by Ogawa in 1908 and final work in 1925 makes rhenium perhaps the last stable element to be understood. Hafnium was discovered in 1923 and all other new elements discovered since then do not have stable isotopes.
Characteristics Rhenium is a silvery-white metal with one of the highest melting points of all elements, exceeded by only tungsten (at standard pressure carbon sublimes rather than melts, though its sublimation point is comparable to the melting points of tungsten and rhenium). It also has one of the highest boiling points of all elements, and the highest among stable elements. It is also one of the densest, exceeded only by platinum, iridium, and osmium. Rhenium has a hexagonal close-packed crystal structure. Its usual commercial form is a powder, but this element can be consolidated by pressing and sintering in a vacuum or hydrogen atmosphere. This procedure yields a compact solid having a density above 90 % of the density of the metal. When annealed this metal is very ductile and can be bent, coiled, or rolled. Rhenium-molybdenum alloys are superconductive at 10 K; tungsten-rhenium alloys are also superconductive around 4–8 K, depending on the alloy. Rhenium metal superconducts at 1.697±0.006 K. In bulk form and at room temperature and atmospheric pressure, the element resists alkalis, sulfuric acid, hydrochloric acid, nitric acid, and aqua regia. It will however, react with nitric acid upon heating.
Isotopes
Rhenium has one stable isotope, rhenium-185, which nevertheless occurs in minority abundance, a situation found only in two other elements (indium and tellurium). Naturally occurring rhenium is only 37.4 % 185Re, and 62.6 % 187Re, which is unstable but has a very long half-life (41.6 billion years). A kilogram of natural rhenium emits 1.07 MBq of radiation due to the presence of this isotope. This lifetime can be greatly affected by the charge state of the rhenium atom. The beta decay of 187Re is used for rhenium–osmium dating of ores. The available energy for this beta decay (2.6 keV) is the second lowest known among all radionuclides, only behind the decay from 115In to excited 115Sn* (0.147 keV). The isotope rhenium-186m is notable as being one of the longest lived metastable isotopes with a half-life of around 200,000 years. There are 33 other unstable isotopes that have been recognized, ranging from 160Re to 194Re, the longest-lived of which is 183Re with a half-life of 70 days.
Compounds
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