Nickel is used in many industrial and consumer products, including stainless steel, magnets, coinage, and special alloys.

It is also used for plating and as a green tint in glass.

Nickel is pre-eminently an alloy metal, and its chief use is in the nickel steels and nickel cast irons, of which there are innumberable varieties.

It is also widely used for many other alloys, such as nickel brasses and bronzes, and alloys with copper, chromium, aluminum, lead, cobalt, silver and gold.

Nickel consumption can be summarized as: nickel steels (60%), nickel-copper alloys and nickel silver (14%), malleable nickel, nickel clad and Inconel (9%), plating (6%), nickel cast irons (3%), heat and electric resistance alloys (3%), nickel brasses and bronzes (2%), others (3%).

In the laboratory, nickel is frequently used as a catalyst for hydrogenation, most often using Raney nickel, a finely divided form of the metal. Extraction and purification Nickel is extracted from its ores by conventional roasting and reduction processes which yield a metal of >75% purity.

Final purification in the Monde process to >99.99% purity is performed by reacting nickel and carbon monoxide to form nickel carbonyl.

This gas is passed into a large chamber at a higher temperature in which tens of thousands of nickel spheres are maintained in constant motion.

The nickel carbonyl decomposes depositing pure nickel onto the nickel spheres (known as pellets).

Alternatively, the nickel carbonyl may be decomposed in a smaller chamber without pellets present to create fine powders.

The resultant carbon monoxide is re-circulated through the process. The highly pure nickel produced by this process is known as carbonyl nickel.

A second common form of refining involves the leaching of the metal matte followed by the electro-winning of the nickel from solution by plating it onto a cathode.

In many stainless steel applications, the nickel can be taken directly in the 75% purity form, depending on the presence of any impurities.