Cobalt(II) naphthenate Cobalt(II) naphthenate Cobalt(II) naphthenate is a mixture of cobalt(II) derivatives of naphthenic acids. These coordination complexes are widely used as oil drying agents for the autoxidative crosslinking of drying oils. Metal naphthenates are not well defined in conventional chemical sense that they are mixtures. They are widely employed catalysts because they are soluble in the nonpolar substrates, such as the alkyd resins or linseed oil. The fact that naphthenates are mixtures helps to confer high solubility. A second virtue of these species is their low cost. A well-defined compound that exhibits many of the properties of cobalt naphthenate is the
Chemical element element cannot be transformed into other chemical elements by chemical processes. Elements during this time were generally distinguished by their atomic weights, a property measurable with fair accuracy by available analytical techniques. The 1913 discovery by English physicist Henry Moseley that the nuclear charge is the physical basis for an atom's atomic number, further refined when the nature of protons and neutrons became appreciated, eventually led to the current definition of an element based on atomic number (number of protons per atomic nucleus). The use of atomic numbers, rather than atomic weights, to distinguish elements has greater predictive value (since