Criticality of Iron and Its Principal Alloying Elements

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• 作者：Philip Nuss ; E. M. Harper ; N. T. Nassar ; Barbara K. Reck ; T. E. Graedel
• 刊名：Environmental Science & Technology
• 出版年：2014
• 出版时间：April 1, 2014
• 年：2014
• 卷：48
• 期：7
• 页码：4171-4177
• 全文大小：440K
• 年卷期：v.48,no.7(April 1, 2014)
• ISSN：1520-5851

文摘

Because modern technology depends on reliable supplies of a wide variety of materials and because of increasing concern about those supplies, a comprehensive methodology was created to quantify the degree of criticality of the metals of the periodic table. In this paper, we apply this methodology to iron and several of its main alloying elements (i.e., vanadium, chromium, manganese, and niobium). These elements represent the basic metals of any industrial society and are vital for national security and economic well-being. Assessments relating to the dimensions of criticality 鈥?supply risk, vulnerability to supply restriction, and environmental implications 鈥?for 2008 are made on the global level and for the United States. Evaluations of each of the multiple indicators are presented, with aggregate results plotted in 鈥渃riticality space鈥? together with Monte Carlo simulation-derived 鈥渦ncertainty cloud鈥?estimates. Iron has the lowest supply risk, primarily because of its widespread geological occurrence. Vanadium displays the highest cradle-to-gate environmental implications, followed by niobium, chromium, manganese, and iron. Chromium and manganese, both essential in steel making, display the highest vulnerability to supply restriction, largely because substitution or substitution at equal performance is not possible for all end-uses. From a comprehensive perspective, we regard the overall criticality as low for iron and modest for the alloying elements we evaluated.