Sources and perperties│Uses│Trend

Sources and perperties
Brucite is hexagonal mineral and native magnesium hydroxide occurs in serpentines and impure limestone, hardness is 2.5 on Moke scale and specific gravity is 2.38-2.40.
Brucite is a semi-rare mineral, before had not been found in China on large scale. Since mid 1990's, large deposit of brucite has been found in China, most commercialy valued mines are located in Fencheng city(formerly a county of Dandong). Up to now, over 4 million tons of reserve has been found in Dandong.

Uses
Brucite is often used as flame retardant filler in plastic industry and paper-making industry; as additive in chemical fertilizer; in environmental protection field, magnesium industry, medical industry ; it is also used as furnace additive in steel-making industry.

Trend
Recent years the application of brucite develops fast in many areas, partly because of the emerging of advanced technological solution. The bright future for brucite may be illustrated by the following two examples.

1) In converter steel-making industry
Calcined brucite lump is being introduced to replace caustic calcined magnesite ball which is currently widely used in slag splashing converter maintenance. Compared with caustic calcined magnesite ball, calcined brucite lump has higher composition of MgO, more suitable fluidity, better reactivity, it could improve the composition of MgO in slag, lengthen the serverce life of converter and reduce the frequency of magnesia brick replacement, thus lower the production cost, now this technique has been applied successfully by some steel manufacturers in Japan.

2) In flame retardant industry
Because of the advantages of mineral fillers(mainly ATH and Magnesium hydroxide) in terms of smoke generation, toxicity, and environmental aspects, they will outpace the more traditional compounds in flame retardant industry.

Although currently ATH is the most important flame retatdant among mineral fillers, it should be noted that magnesium hydroxide is the most fastest growing part. Compared with ATH, Magnesium hydroxide has a lower smoke generation, higher temperature stability field (up to 340℃) than ATH (200℃) , which allows the processing with a wide variety of thermoplastics, eg. polypropylene or nylons. The recent technological breakthrough in overcoming some of disadvantages of magnesium hydroxide(e.g. impurity or high loading") greatly increases its market potential.