Payment for this item must be via bank wire transfer or crypto. Quantities are very limited because of the great difficulty in making them as well as securing the raw material itself.

Luciteria is immensely proud to now offer these beautifully made bars of essentially pure iridium ahead of the leading bullion makers which have for a variety of reasons not been able to produce them so far. Despite these background roles investors have long wanted to add iridium to their portfolios given the attractive proposition of its great rarity on the one hand and the rapidly growing number of its potential uses on the other. So this otherwise highly desirable noble metal is put to use in decidedly blue collar tasks such as turning it into spark plug tips, catalytic converters and even crucibles to hold lesser metals in their molten state. It can’t be cut, lathed, drilled, milled or tooled in any way for it invariably breaks both itself and the machine that dared to form it. It cannot be hammered into shape as doing so will make it shatter. With a melting point twice the maximum operating temperature that ordinary furnaces can reach, casting is out of the question. With that enviable resume how come it’s not as popular as gold or platinum? Well, its Achille’s heel is that it’s damn near impossible to make anything out of it. Extremely dense, super rare, rustproof and very, very costly. The fact that it has a high resistance to corrosion makes it useful for items such as hypodermic needles and rocket engines, and the aerospace industry uses iridium to produce alloys that will give a long life to certain engine parts, as well as being used to make corrosion resistant deep water pipes.Iridium is in many ways the ultimate precious metal. Iridium is used as an additive to platinum, creating alloys that increase the hardness of the platinum. The remaining 25% finds use in outlets such as for crucibles, spark plugs and alloys. Around 25% of iridium is used by the chemical industry, another 25% is used in the electrical industry, the electro-chemical industry, and in particular the chlor-alkali industry, also around 25%. Presently, 37% of iridium is consumed by the electronics industry, due its high corrosion (highest) and heat (10th highest) resistance qualities. 191Ir and 193Ir are the only two naturally occurring isotopes of iridium, as well as the only stable isotopes the latter is the more abundant of the two. The annual production and consumption of iridium is only 3 tonnes. The name iridium comes from the Latin word for rainbow ‘Iris’, due to its highly coloured salts. This powder he then tested by using a combination of acid and alkali treatments, eventually separating into two new metals which he called osmium and iridium. He came across it whilst analysing a specimen of crude platinum, which when dissolved in dilute aqua regia did not all go into solution, with some remaining as a powder. Indeed, the metal’s presence within the Earth could have only originated from space.Īn Englishman, Smithson Tennant, is credited with the discovery of iridium. Iridium has been implicated as a factor in the extinction of life 65 million years ago, as its abundance is far higher in meteorites than within the Earth’s crust. Iridium is unaffected by air, water and acids, and the only two substances that will dissolve it are molten sodium cyanide and potassium cyanide. It is one of the hardest and most corrosion resistant metals known, and is the 2nd most dense metal after osmium, being 20 times denser than water. Iridium, along with the likes of platinum, is considered a precious metal. It is the 84th most abundant element within the Earth’s crust, meaning it is very rare. Iridium is a hard, brittle, lustrous, silvery metal belonging to Group 9 of the Periodic Table.

Iridium metal for sale