What is the material that has the highest boiling point?

[Nissen, Søren Rune]

Me and a colleague are looking (Just for the fun of it) for the material which has the highest boiling point. Our evaporater, which we use to boil palladium, claims that since it can boil Wolfram/Tungsten, it can evaporate anything. Material physics like this is not my strong suit, but surely there must be a material on Earth that has a higher boiling point? Possibly some ceramic material like they use on the space shuttle?

 

[Gokul43201]

I'm not real familiar with e-beam evaporators (I'm guessing that's what you have), but do you keep the tunsten in a crucible ? If you do, then your crucible material probably is one solution.

In any case, here's an additional list for you to look through and double check :

Many carbides are very high melting and hence high boiling materials (particularly carbides of zirconium, niobium and tantalum). A reasonably new material known as Zircar (or zirconia felt) melts at nearly 5000C (this is possibly very close to that "highest boiling point" material that you are looking for). And not to leave out the obvious, check out graphite and diamond !

You do know that you can successfully evaporate a material without ever reaching the boiling point. All you need is sufficient vapor pressure at the working T,P.

 

[Gokul43201]

As a cautionary note : it's not wise to put unwanted materials in your evaporator, just for the fun of it. Contamination could easily lead to the failure of every future material/device/sample that gets made in the same evaporator, because of a material incompatibility (accidental doping).

 

[Astronuc]

Rhenium has the highest boiling point of the elements - Boiling point [/K]: 5869 [or 5596 °C (10105 °F)] (liquid range: 2410 K)

www.webelements.com

Possibly one of the carbides has a slightly higher boiling point.

Gokul gives some good advice - be careful what you put in your equipment.

Usually one volatizes (or vaporize) high temperature materials in an inductively coupled plasma (ICP). There is nothing solid in which such material can be contained (since it has the highest boiling point). So such a state is transient, at least in earthly environments.

 

[Nissen, Søren Rune]

Gokul: Yes, it's a mini e-beam evaporator, an EGCO4.

And, obviously, the crucible is resistant. Answer right under my nose the whole time.

And I'm not going to put anything but palladium in the evaporator, I know of the contamination dangers. Also of the fact that you don't need to bring it to the boiling point. There's a bit of translation trouble there, "evaporate" and "boil" are pretty much synonyms in danish.

Thank you, both of you.