Touchscreen with Indium
Touchscreen with Indium
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drawing indium bar

Indium

Daily in everyone’s hand: touch screens with indium

Properties of Indium

The silver-white glossy resource is a byproduct of zinc smelting processes. In its pure form, indium is extremely soft. It can be split with a knife, one can even carve notches into it with your fingernail. However, if one tries to bend it, a cracking sound can be heard and the crystals break. This unusualness expressed in numbers: Already at 156 °C (313 °F) indium melts, at 2,080 °C (3.776 °F) it passes into the gaseous state.
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indium barren

Applications for Indium

Indium surrounds us in almost every object of modern life: in the computer monitor at work, in the mobile phone when making a phone call, in the super-flat TV screen in the living room. Indium is most commonly used for LCD displays. Indium compounds are also playing an increasingly important role in thin-film photovoltaics (solar cell technology) and nanotechnology.

Indium compounds play a central role: for flat-screen televisions, solar cells and nano technologies.

Indium compounds play a central role: for flat-screen televisions, solar cells and nano technologies.

Tangbile Asset Indium

Worth Knowing

Indium is on the list of critical technology metals the EU Commission predicts supply bottlenecks for. A key reason for this is that China is responsible for more than half of its production and can thus control the market. The largest deposits are also in China. At present, indium’s production capacity is 1,000 tonnes per year, but demand is increasing.

The trend is driven by, for example, larger screens (buying 75-inch flat screens could increase by 240 per cent by 2020). But the global expansion of 5G mobile networks is also likely to play a major role.

You can find out more about Indium on our information page indium.de.

Price History

pricechart indium

Note: The graph shows only the price history of the metal in the leading trading form, but not a concrete price. This always depends on the delivery quantity and other factors. The graph is for orientation only. We would love to tell you more in a nonbinding information talk.

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