Uses of Antimony

As a minor metal, the strategic metal antimony has many diversified and indispensable uses, both military and commercial. The most important uses of antimony include the following:

• Flame retardant in in children's clothes, toys, soft furniture, plastics (including soft drink bottles), aircraft and automobile covers and plastics for the construction industry.
• In standard car batteries to extend battery life
• Enhance the production process efficiency for PEt plastic containers used for soft drink bottles.
• Antimony is used in ammunition, fireworks, pharmaceuticals, pesticides and the new EU-mandated fluorescent light bulbs.
• For the new Samsung Electronics phase change devices for mobile phones and laptop. They are apparently 30 times faster than normal flash memory.

A significant new use for antimony is the development of a new generation of memory devices which will replace flash drive memory devices presently used in computers, mobile phones and USB memory devices. These new memory devices – known as phase-change devices – use an alloy of germanium, antimony and tellurium (Ge 2Sb2te5) known as “GSt”. in June 2010, Samsung Electronics started mass-producing these phase-change devices from GSt for use in mobile phones and laptops. these devices are up to 30 times faster than normal flash memory.