Molybdenum Industry Development

Because molybdenum is easy to oxidize, brittle, molybdenum smelting and processing level is limited, molybdenum has not been able to carry out mechanical processing, and therefore can not be applied to industrial production on a large scale, used only some molybdenum compounds. 1891, the French company Schneider Schneider took the lead in molybdenum as an alloying element to produce molybdenum-containing armored plate, and found that it has superior performance, and molybdenum's density is only half of that of tungsten, molybdenum Molybdenum gradually replaced tungsten as the alloying element of steel, thus opening the prelude to the industrial application of molybdenum.
At the end of the 19th century, it was discovered that after molybdenum was added to steel, the properties of molybdenum steel were similar to those of tungsten steel of the same composition. 1900, the molybdenum iron production process was developed, and molybdenum steel was able to satisfy the needs of artillery steel materials with its special properties, which was also discovered, which led to the rapid development of the production of molybdenum steel in 1910. Since then, molybdenum has been an important component of a wide range of heat- and corrosion-resistant structural steels, as well as of non-ferrous nickel and chromium alloys.

The industrial production of molybdenum metal and its widespread use in the electrical industry began around the same time as tungsten metal (1909), partly because the powder metallurgy and pressure machining processes for the production of both dense metals had been successfully developed and were fully ready for production, and partly because the outbreak of World War I led to a sharp increase in the demand for tungsten, and the shortage of ferro-tungsten accelerated molybdenum's emergence as an important component of many high-hardness and impact-resistant steels. impact resistant steels. As demand for molybdenum grew, a search for new sources of molybdenum began, culminating in the discovery of the large Climax molybdenum deposit in Colorado, U.S.A., which was mined in 1918.

In order to solve the problem of the sharp decline in demand for molybdenum after the end of World War I, people began to study molybdenum in the new civil industry applications, such as alloy steel containing molybdenum used in the production of wheels. 1930, the researchers proposed that forging and heat treatment of molybdenum-based high-speed steel must be the appropriate degree, this discovery for the molybdenum to open up the market of new applications, the molybdenum as an alloying element in the application of iron and steel and other areas of the research also entered a new stage. By the end of the 1930s, molybdenum had become a widely used industrial raw material. During the Second World War, the U.S. Climax Molybdenum Company developed the vacuum arc melting method, with which it obtained molybdenum ingots weighing 450-1000 kg, opening the way for molybdenum to be used as a structural material. 1945, the end of the Second World War once again triggered the study of molybdenum's application in the field of civil industry, and the reconstruction of the post-war period opened up a broad market for the application of many molybdenum-containing tool steels. 50s later, the study of molybdenum mainly focused on the application of the element in steel and other fields of application. After the 1950s, research into molybdenum focused mainly on the composition and production processes of heat-resistant molybdenum-based alloys. Nowadays, high purity, compositing and nanocompositing of molybdenum materials are the main directions of research, and the annual global production of molybdenum has risen from 100,000 tons at the end of the 1970s to 225,000 tons in 2012, and molybdenum has been used in a wider and wider range of applications, including iron and steel, petroleum, chemical industry, electrical and electronic technology, pharmaceuticals and agriculture, and so on.