Quoting IU News "In two years of being online, 7,000 people from 89 countries have accessed Professor Chen Zhu’s public database of thermodynamic properties of rare-earth and other critical minerals; the Earth and Atmospheric Sciences Professor and his team have added nearly 200 data points about commonly mined minerals.
Rare-earth elements are a set of commercially important but hard-to-extract heavy metals found in the Earth’s crust. They have permanent magnetic properties, making them a hot commodity for electric vehicles, wind turbines, cell phones, and other high-tech products. Their name comes not from their scarcity (the U.S. Geological Survey describes them as “relatively abundant”) but from the difficulty of separating them from the ores in which they occur.
Zhu, a professor in the Department of Earth and Atmosopheric Sciences within the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University Bloomington, along with postdoctoral research associate Ruiguang Pan, recently authored a publication in the open-access journal Minerals that focuses on rare-earth element phosphates found in ores. “If you can mine it and make a profit, it’s an ore deposit. If you can’t, it’s just a rock,” said Zhu."
The College of Arts