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The INTERNET Database of Periodic Tables

There are thousands of periodic tables in web space, but this is the only comprehensive database of periodic tables & periodic system formulations. If you know of an interesting periodic table that is missing, please contact the database curator: Mark R. Leach Ph.D.

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Year:  2020 PT id = 1165

Vernon's (Partially Disordered) 15 Column Periodic Table

A formulation by René Vernon, who writes:

"Here is a 15-column table which is a hybrid of a Mendeleev 8-column table and an 18-column standard table. The key relocations are the p-block nonmetals to the far left; and the coinage and post-transition metals under their s and early d-block counterparts.

"Taking a leaf out of Mendeleev's playbook, I ignored atomic number order when this seemed appropriate. It's refreshing to see the traditional horizontal gaps between blocks disappear. (DIM did not like these.)

"Since Dias (2004, see references below) reckoned a periodic table is a partially ordered set forming a two-dimensional array, I believe I now have a partially ordered table that is partially disordered twice over.

"The table has some curious relationships. Equally, some relationships seen in the standard form are absent. The Group 2, 3, and aluminium dilemmas disappear. This confirms my impression that such dilemmas have no intrinsic meaning. Rather, their appearance or non-appearance is context dependent."

Notes & references below.

Groups 1 to 4 have either a C or F suffix where C (nonmetal) is after the importance of carbon to our existence; and F (metal) is for the importance of iron to civilisation.

Groups 1C and 1F present the greatest contrast in nonmetallic and metallic behaviour.

Coactive Nonmetals: They are capable of forming septenary heterogeneous compounds such as C20H26N4O10PSSe.

Group 2C: Helium is shaded as a noble gas. "Heliox" is a breathing gas mixture of helium and oxygen used in saturation diving, and as a medical treatment for patients with difficulty breathing.

Group 3C: Boron over nitrogen looks odd. Yet one boron atom and one nitrogen atom have the same number of electrons between them as two adjacent carbon atoms. The combination of nitrogen and boron has some unusual features that are hard to match in any other pair of elements (Niedenzu & Dawson 1965).

Boron and phosphorus form a range of ring and cage compounds having novel structural and electronic properties (Paine et al. 2005).

Metalloids. I treat them here as nonmetals given their chemistry is predominately that of chemically weak nonmetals.

Metals: The labels electropositive; transition; and electronegative are adapted from Kornilov (2008).

Group 1F: Monovalent thallium salts resemble those of silver and the alkali metals.

An alloy of cesium (73.71%), potassium (22.14%) and sodium (4.14%) has a melting point of –78.2°C (–108.76°F) (Oshe 1985).

Silver, copper, and gold, as well as being the coinage metals, are borderline post-transition metals.

Group 2F: Beryllium and magnesium are not in fact alkaline earths. Beryllium is amphoteric rather than alkaline; magnesium was isolated in impure form from its oxides, unlike the true alkaline earths. The old ambiguity over whether beryllium and magnesium should go over calcium or zinc has gone.

Nobelium is here since +2 is its preferred oxidation state, unlike other actinoids.

Group 3F: Aluminium is here in light of its similarity to scandium (Habishi 2010).

InGaAsP is a semiconducting alloy of gallium arsenide and indium phosphide, used in lasers and photonics.

There is no Group 3 "issue" since lanthanum, actinium, lutetium and lawrencium are in the same family.

Gold and aluminium form an interesting set of intermetallic compounds known as Au5Al2 (white plague) and AuAl2 (purple plague). Blue gold is an alloy of gold and either gallium or indium.

Lanthanoids: The oxidation state analogies with the transition metals stop after praseodymium. That is why the rest of lanthanoids are footnoted in dash-dot boxes.

Actinoids: The resemblance to their transition metal analogues falters after uranium, and peters out after plutonium.

Group 4F: It's funny to see titanium—the lightweight super-metal—in the same group as lead, the traditional "heavy" metal.

This is the first group impacted by the lanthanoid contraction (cerium through lutetium) which results in the atomic radius of hafnium being almost the same as that of zirconium. Hence "the twins".

The chemistry of titanium is significantly different from that of zirconium and hafnium (Fernelius 1982).

Lead zirconate titanate Pb[ZrxTi1–x]O3 (0 ≤ x ≤ 1) is one of the most commonly used piezo ceramics.

Group 5: Bismuth vanadate BiVO4 is a bright yellow solid widely used as a visible light photo-catalyst and dye.

Steel Friends: The name is reference to their use in steel alloys. They have isoelectronic soluble oxidizing tetroxoanions, plus a stable +3 oxidation state. (Rayner-Canham 2020).

Ferromagnetic Metals: The horizontal similarities among this triad of elements (as is the case among the PGM hexad) are greater than anywhere in the periodic table except among the lanthanides (Lee 1996). The +2 aqueous ion is a major component of their simple chemistry (Rayner-Canham 2020).

Group 8: "Rubiferous metals" (classical Latin rubēre to be red; -fer producing) is from the reddish-brown colour of rust; the most prevalent ruthenium precursor being ruthenium trichloride, a red solid that is poorly defined chemically but versatile synthetically; and the red osmates [OsO4(OH)4]?2 formed upon reaction by osmium tetroxide with a base.

Group 9: "Weather metals" comes from the use of cobalt chloride as a humidity indicator in weather instruments; rhodium plating used to "protect other more vulnerable metals against weather exposure as well as against concentrated acids or acids fumes" (Küpfer 1954); and the "rainbow" etymology of iridium.

Group 10: "Catalytic metals" is after a passage in Greenwood and Earnshaw, "They are... readily obtained in finely divided forms which are catalytically very active." (2002). Of course, many transition metals have catalytic properties. That said, if you asked me about transition metal catalysts, palladium and platinum would be the first to come to mind. Group 10 appear to be particularly catalytic.

References:

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© Mark R. Leach Ph.D. 1999 –


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