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 Scandium is the chemical element with atomic number 21, symbol Sc.

It is a soft transition metal, silvery white in appearance. Scandium is found in a few rare minerals from Scandinavia. It is classified with yttrium and lanthanides in rare earths.
Scandium has 25 isotopes of mass number varying between 36 and 60, and 10 known nuclear isomers. Among them, only 45Sc is stable and constitutes all the scandium present in nature, making scandium both a monoisotopic element and a mononucleidic element. Its standard atomic mass is 44.955912 (6)
Scandium is a soft, rare, trivalent, very light metallic element which becomes yellowish or pink when exposed to air. This element has chemical properties intermediate between those of aluminum and yttrium. The most common oxidation state of scandium is +3.
World production is low, on the order of a few tonnes per year, and its price high ($ 10,000 / kg).

By adding scandium iodide to a metal halide lamp, a light source spectrally comparable to the Sun is obtained (color temperature of 4000 K - "neutral white") which is used as a light source for night video or indoors.
The radioactive isotope 46Sc, due to its short half-life (84 days), is used as a marker in petroleum refineries during cracking and for the detection of leaks from pipelines.

Scandium with a melting point much higher than that of aluminum and almost as light (density 2.9) is studied for possible aerospace applications.

The USSR has widely developed industrial scandium production and has optimized an aluminum alloy containing 2% scandium, which considerably strengthens the mechanical characteristics of aluminum. This alloy is commonly used in Russian military aircraft construction. A complementary property of this alloy is that it is weldable while this is not the case of a lithium aluminum alloy developed in the West at the same time (this problem is now resolved) for equivalent mechanical characteristics.

Scandium is the most powerful of the known anti-recrystallizers in aluminum. This property is currently of interest to the aeronautical industry. It is used at very low rates (less than 0.5%) to, for example, maintain a fiber texture even after multiple heat treatments.

Scandium oxide (Sc2O3) can be used to protect optical surfaces because it is very hard, resistant, UV transparent and fairly resistant to corrosion.


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rhenium    germanium    zirconium     cadmium     hafnium

      barium   lithium     beryllium     strontium     calcium

      Tantalum    gadolinium    samarium      yttrium   ytterbium

       Lutetium    praseodymium   holmium     erbium   thulium     dysprosium

       terbium   europium  lanthanum   cerium   neodymium  scandium 

         rubidium    cesium

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