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Titanium As Cheap As Aluminum?
ThesQuid writes: "I caught this article in The Economist the other week. If practical, the electrolytic process described could make the production of titanium as cheap as aluminum. Ridiculous? Just remember, aluminum used to be refined by a process somewhat similar to how titanium is refined nowadays, and when a practical electrolytic refining process was discovered the price of it went from more precious than gold to something, well, as cheap as aluminum is nowadays."
The way that I think of it is this from heaviest to lightest Steel-titanium-aluminum. From designed strength highest to lowest, Steel-titanium-aluminum. However, the strength-to-weight ratio from highest to lowest goes like this: aluminum-titanium-steel.
I did enjoy the nice selection of links which you provided with your comment. Thank you indeed.
Keeping
In Genius , the Richard Feynman biography, there was an anecdote where the scientists working on the nuclear bomb at Los Alamos discovered they could requesition *anything* from the army. After asking for and recieving a 12 inch diameter solid sphere of gold (later cut in half and used as a door stop) they asked for a kilogram of osmium, only to be turned down when it was discovered that that significantly more than existed in pure form in the entire world at that time.
/* This post not warrantied for mission critical applications. */
Besides, beryllium is EXTREMELY tightly controlled ; mostly due to its very interesting properties when building "uncontrolled" nuclear fission devices (ie, bombs). Beryllium has the very interesting property of being a very good neutron reflector, which means that if you coat a mass of fissible material with a (thin !) beryllium reflector, you reduce by two or three the critical mass.
n dex.html for more design details (search for Beryllium there).
:-)
Also, Beryllium can be used as a source of neutrons (when bombarded with alpha rays), which again, is a desireable property when building certain types of devices...
Both effects have been put to use even since Trinity...
see the HEW archive at http://www.enviroweb.org/issues/nuketesting/hew/i
In short: don't show up at an airport with some Be on you. You'd Be In Trouble (tm)
~=Keelor
A chunk of a Diamondtalk.com Forum has some nice information on this. In particular, one poster cited an article in The Atlantic entitled "Have you ever tried to sell a diamond?" notably, it says the following:
Just like any other cartel, like the Cocaine People(tm).
That's true now, but remember that previous article in The Atlantic? Well, it links to another article which has this next juicy tidbit:
Namaqualand is described slightly above that snippet of text as "...a sandy slab of South Africa along the Atlantic coast. Namaqualand's pan-hot desert and scraped little hills start north of Cape Town and run up to the Orange River..." which is striking, because what that means is that at one time, you could head off from Cape Town, go to the beach with a rake, and just dig up uncut diamonds.
Also, the American Museum of Natural History has a nice diamond web exhibit which contains, among other things, this page which points out that diamonds were discovered in South Africa by a boy finding one just lying around on his father's farm. Nice anectodal evidence.
And just to make you ill without sending you to goatse.cx, consider this article (in Red Herring) which talks about a company (now called Blue Nile) which got billions of dollars (literally) in two rounds of VC funding in one month.
So when you're forking over two months' salary for an engagement ring like a barmy git, keep in mind that once upon a memory you could walk on the beach in Cape Town and spontaneously find a diamond in your toes. How often do you think that happens nowadays?
Enough data mining for tonight. You're all on your own from here on out.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
See the extensive data for your selves:
http://www.matweb.com/GetIndex2.asp
Aluminum has good points too... like it's got really high thermal/electrical conduction, and you can injection mold it. The latter is pretty cool, and happens because its high temp viscocity falls at high pressure. And interestingly if you go to small enough length scales like the TI micro-mirrors where you lengths are near the grain size of Aluminum the reliability goes way up.
http://www.dlp.com/dlp/resources/whitepapers/me
So how long until titanium foil hits the shelves?
One fellow had the bright idea of making himself a titanium helmet. It looked more or less normal, but it was incredibly light, and it gave him massive bragging rights..... Until he got into battle. The first head hit, he went down with a concussion.
After that, the SCA changed the rules so that helmets had to have a minimal weight. It turns out that the added inertia is part of the protection that they provide.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
What I want is... Adamantium.
Reinforced Skeleton, here I come!
I think that is amazing. Just in case you were wondering what a grammar nazi knows about Materials Science, don't.
Also, don't ask what a Grammar Nazi knows about neurosurgery. "Brain surgeons" don't hold individual neurons during surgery. In fact, you would be very surprised to that common standard brain surgery tools include tongue depressors, spatulas (the tiny ones used to measure out chemicals, not the ones you use to flip burgers) and other 'blunt' devices rather than scalpels/forceps, etc. Despite its delicacy, the texture/consistency of the brain (especially as contrasted to the vascular structures within it) lends itself to certain rather unexpected techniques of manipulation.
Further, medical science is nowhere near the level of manipulating individual neurons, and it is questionable whether it would ever want to -- the brain isn't like a microchip, where a single miswired trace causes a logic unit to fail. Single neurons are not that important, and a general principle of neurosurgery is to ablate (destroy) a region, and let the brain rewire itself around it (like the Net). If specific neurons are ever targeted (in our lifetime) it will be chemically (e.g. with tailored antibodies, etc.) With 10 billion neurons (and single axons that may run a tangled path many centimeters long) -not to mention the 100 billion 'support cells'- the brain is not amenable to 'simple rewiring by hand'. Have you considered the problem of locating and manipulating, any significant number of indivdual neurons.
That is not to say that *researchers* don't often manipulate individual neurons for any number of reasons (in lab apparatus, not in patients). I'm sure that they will find a use for such micro-forceps in their work.
DISCLAIMER: I am not a neurosurgeon, but I am a physician. I was also raised by a neurosurgeon, and spent way too much of my early 20's doing things like "emptying (squid) interneurons" -- squeezing them out like toothpaste tubes, so we could perform experiments on the cell membrane.
"But, it is well known, what strikes the capricious mind of the poet is not always what affects the mass of readers." -
Note Grammar Nazi is an idiot. He knows no material science and did no research.
Titanium isn't a superstrong superlight alloy. Titanium has roughly twice the specific strength of aluminum. Titanium also has approximately the same specific stiffness as aluminum. This means the aluminum is just as springy as titanium, but it breaks sooner. Look it up.
Titanium will always be harder to work with than aluminum. True but not for the reasons you site. Titanium is about 50% stiffer than aluminum but is 200% stronger. This makes it a bear to machine as opposed to aluminum which is wonderful to machine. In terms of raw materials, the two may be close, but in terms of manufacturing aluminum beats titanium every time.
Titanium may become cheaper than steel. Steel is not cheap due to its abundance or ease of refining. Steel is used in many application today because it is easy to manufacture. You can weld steel. Most of a products cost is not in raw materials, it is in manufacturing. Therefore steel is cheap.
BTW as nice as titanium is for some things, it really doesn't matter. Compared to advanced fiber reinforced composites, titanium is nothing. Its most likely going to be too expensive to work with compared to steel and aluminum and not good enough as advanced materials go.
So far I've gotten all my Karma from telling people they are wrong... :)
I'm a machinist, and as an Expert In The Field, yeah, it would be neat to see a titanium beer can, but....
Titanium is a *bitch* to work with. It does *not* want to be worked. It doesn't like to be turned, milled, or ground, and if you're using a surface grinder and oil as a coolant, keep a fire extinguisher handy.
Or just shut off the oil.
I don't even want to imagine what it's like to weld.
Anyway, I digress...
Yeah, it'd be cool to see titanium as cheap as aluminum. It could be useful where aluminum cannot take the place of steel. It still won't make aluminum any less useful. Aluminum is *much* easier to work with (6061 alloy, anyone?), and therefore, less expensive for a finished product. You'll still see aluminum beer cans and aluminum engine blocks in the future.
Titanium is as strong as steel, but 45% lighter. It is 60% heavier than aluminum, but twice as strong. Not surprisingly, it is often used in aircraft and missle hulls, as well as lacrosse sticks and mountian bike frames. It's used in that rainbow-hued metallic jewlery available at the mall. Because it's not corroded by salt water, it's used in desalination plants, propellers and other marine applications (including lures). Titanium is used to make "Shape memory alloys", notably nitinol (nickel-titanium). You can use nitinol wire to make walking robots, with the nitinol used as the musculature. It it used in pigments and is what makes white toothpaste white (TiO2). In fact, this is its major use. Plus, it's shiny. :)
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Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Well if you want to get technical about it Aluminum makes up 8.2% of the crust. Titanium makes up .56% of the crust. On top of this all Aluminum is mined from highly leached clay deposits near the surface. These deposits are formed in areas with a tropical climate and were only formed in the last 60 Million years. The Soviets tried getting Aluminium out of igneous rocks earlier this century. They even couldn't make Aluminum in an economical manner.
At any rate Titanium is obtained from rutile or Ilmenite that are from ocean beach sands or titianium bearing igneous rocks. In the late 80's and early 90's the US produced 25,000 metric tons per year of Titanium metal. The other major use of Titanium is white piment for paints and for the same period, 1 million metric tons of Titianium pigment was produced per year. By contrast the US used 6 million metric tons of Aluminum in the mid 1990s. At any rate due to the rarity of Titanium deposits I doubt that Titanium will ever be as cheap as Aluminum. For that matter Titanium is a much harder metal than Aluminum and wears out tools that manufacture Titanium much faster. It is possible though that Titanium will be used in place of Aluminum in many cases. Don't count on Titanium replacing Aluminium cans though.
Impersonating Tycho from Penny Arcade since before there was a PA.
When the Washington Monument, National Mall, Washington, D.C. was completed, a one-pound chunk of aluminum formed the very tip of the monument. Reasoning: it was a precious metal at that time. It was akin to placing a gemstone there.
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Keeping
At least for bike frames, I was under the impression that most of the premium was because titanium is so difficult to work with. This suggests that costs may not fall too much for frames, even if the material becomes suddenly cheap.
Merlin Metalworks, who make some of the nicest, imo (I ride a Kona myself as I don't have unlimited funds), frames on the market, has a titanium primer up that has some relevant info on how weld quality is very important when working with titanium, among other tidbits.
Here are a few more facts about Titanium:
Titanium isn't a superstrong superlight alloy- On the periodic table, as you move up and to the left, the solid elements have an increasing strength-to-weight ratio. This means that Beryllium is the lightest/strongest metal for practical use. Aluminum even has a higher tensile strength-to-weight ratio than titanium. Why isn't aluminum considered a ubermetal, similar to titanium? I think it is. One problem with aluminum is that it fatigues when it flexes. This is why aluminum bicycles have thick thin-walled tubes, so they can't flex. When properly designed, aluminum will provide a better strength-to-weight ratio than titanium.
Titanium will always be harder to work with than aluminum- Aluminum is lightweight and easy to work with. The industry has over 50 years of experience working with aluminum, whereas they have 30 years of good experience with titanium. Commercial products (golf clubs, bicycles) didn't start using titanium until the '80s and the decline of the Cold War, when the military-fed companies had to start selling to the civilian industry. Even after titanium knowledge gets closer to what we know about aluminum, we will continue to push aluminum, since it is cheaper and softer (i.e. cheaper to work with).
Titanium does have great properties- Did you ever wonder why many titanium bicycles don't have any paint? There's no paint because they don't need any, titanium is one of the least reactive metals there is (ironically, this is what makes it hard to process, too). So, where other metals have to be painted to reacted to prevent corrosion, titanium is fine as it is. This property also makes titanium nice for biological applications (bones, valves, etc.).
Another nice property of titanium is its resilience. Titanium has a relatively large linear elastic strain region, i.e. it's very springy. This is what makes titanium great for bicycle seat rails, but not neccessarily bicycle frames (unless you like the wet-noodle feeling on a bike). Before you flame me, realize that good design prevents this.
Titanium may become cheaper than steel- I wish someone else would have pointed this out. Now that they can process titanium in one step, it may have a chance to compete with steel. Since we have been forming steel since the middle ages, it has a long way to go, but due to its strength-to-weight properties, corrosion resistance, and resiliance it could easily surpase Steel as the cheap standard metal. Perhaps the lack of painting on titanium can make up for its higher temperature (higher temp->more energy->more $$$) of processing. Since it would have a higher working temperature I could easily see it being used in engines and buildings. Ti's resilience may create for very Earthquake proof/fire proof buildings. If you talk to someone who works with Ti, they will say that it is too funky to machine and work with, it's resilience fights back against the machinist. I think that the machinists need to get used to the metal and that is all.
If you read all the way to the end of this, now you'll see the good part- Titanium has many applications in the area of nanotechnology. TiNi has shape-memory properties which means that you can do cool stuff with it. For example, I've stretched TiNi Super-elastic wire. Basically, it was a wire that stretched similar to a rubber band. Also, by alternating thin layers of TiNi on the surfaces of other metals you can create various thermal strains and stresses due to thermal expansion anisotropy. A practical application of this are new forceps used in brain surgery. A human hair is ~100-300 microns in diameter, while these forceps are ~0.6-1 microns in diameter. Brain surgens use these to hold brain neurons while performing surgery.
I think that is amazing. Just in case you were wondering what a grammar nazi knows about Materials Science, don't.
Keeping