metals

Important for electromobility

Cobalt (chemical terminology; Latin cobaltum, standard language cobalt; named by the first describer after the cobalt ore as the starting material Cobalt Rex is a chemical element with the element symbol Co and the atomic number 27. Cobalt is a ferromagnetic transition metal from the 9th group or cobalt group of the periodic table. In the older way of counting it belongs to the 8th subgroup or iron-platinum group.

Cobalt ores and cobalt compounds have been known for a long time and were mainly used as cobalt blue for coloring glass and ceramics. In the Middle Ages they were often mistaken for valuable silver and copper ores. However, since they could not be processed and gave off a bad odor when heated due to the arsenic content, they were regarded as bewitched. Supposedly, goblins ate up the precious silver and excreted worthless silver-colored ores in its place. In addition to cobalt, these were also tungsten and nickel ores. The miners then gave these ores nicknames such as nickel, tungsten (e.g. "wolf foam", Latin lupi spuma) and kobold ore, i.e. cobalt. In 1735, the Swedish chemist Georg Brandt discovered the hitherto unknown metal while processing cobalt ore, described its properties and gave it its current name. In 1780, Torbern Olof Bergman discovered that cobalt is an element while examining its properties more closely.

Since lithium-ion accumulators came onto the market in the 1990s, cobalt has been used for accumulators, especially for mobile applications, since the lithium-cobalt oxide accumulator has a particularly high energy density.