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."

Comments

Re:Uses of titanium

[grammar nazi]

Dear 1010011010, Please back up your comments in the future. You say that titanium is as strong as steel, but the fact is that steel is stronger in a tensile tests with the same cross sectional area. Indeed titanium is lighter than steel, but you claim that it is twice as strong as aluminum. If you compare tensile strength-to-weight ratios, than aluminum comes out the winner.

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.

Re:Could this mean more elemental commodities?

[vheissu]

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.

Re:But dont forget.... (nukes !)

[Chep]

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.

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/in dex.html for more design details (search for Beryllium there).

In short: don't show up at an airport with some Be on you. You'd Be In Trouble (tm) :-)

Titanium helmets

[darkonc]

For those of you who don't know about the SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism), they do reasonably realistic recreataions of medieval times -- including combat (though they use padded and blunted weapons).

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.

Titanium beer cans and whatnot.

[bmo]

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.

Re:Titanium beer cans and whatnot.

[phillymjs]

In the book Skunk Works there's a pretty good account of how the Lockheed guys had unbelievable problems working with titanium during the construction of the SR-71.

They had to develop special procedures and tools, and eventually got good enough working with it to efficiently mass-produce the Blackbird, but the book also mentions that their tools were ordered destroyed when the project was end-of-lifed, and most if not all of the guys who developed those procedures are probably worm food by now. It is workable, but if all the handling information was destroyed, the procedures will have to be rediscovered.

Uses of titanium

[1010011010]

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. :)

________________________________________

Re:Uses of titanium

[po_boy]

Don't forget medical supplies like implants. The human body doesn't reject titanium and it doesn't rust, so that's what they make the screws and stuff that they use to put humpty-dumpty back together again.

cool, hunh?

Re:But dont forget....

[Tycho]

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.

Aluminum was a "precious metal."

[Speare]

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.

Some titanium info

[tap]

I remember reading an interesting post about the titanium industry in rec.bicycles.tech a while back. So I went and found it on dejanews so I could whore for karma. Actually, I just thought other people might find it interesting too.

As one of those responsible for the titanium rush, perhaps I can shed some light on where the titanium used in bikes comes from.

Most of the titanium used in bikes comes from Australia. Yup, the deserts of western Australia are the source for most of the titanium ore used in the world today. Titanium ore is an abundant resource (titanium is the fifth most abundant metallic element on our planet), and white sand is the best place to find it.

Most of this material never is never processed into metal. Over 90% is refined into titanium dioxide, a common white pigment used in paint.

The most common destination for the sand used in making metallic titanium is China. The Chinese produce a very high quality titanium sponge that is used worldwide to produce primary mill products all over the world. The United States, France, Russia, and Ukraine all produce sponge as well. Most US producers of primary mill products use a significant amount of Chinese produced titanium sponge.

In most cases, virgin material is mixed 1:4 with scrap material making titanium one of the most recycled metals. This is where the Russian or Ukraine material comes in. Most scrap from the former Soviet states is contaminated, and cannot be used to produce ingot for tube production. Material with high levels of chemical contamination can be used for low quality castings, and finds its' way into golf club head, valve bodies, etc.

About the only titanium tube that you will find that contains significant amounts of Russian material is tube from Russia. There is not a great economic advantage in using poor quality scrap from Russia, when high grade domestic scrap is available in the United States.

Litespeed uses material from Ancotech and Haynes International. The sponge used to produce the raw material for these tubes is from either China or Henderson (Nevada) depending on the price. Orement/Wah Chang or Timet produce 100% of all the starting billets used by the big three companies in the United States (Ancotech, Haynes International, and Sandvik Special Metals).

Oremet (Albany Oregon) has broken and recycled an entire pressure hull from an Alpha attack sub. None of the material was used to produce ingot for tube production, but this may be a source for much of the Urban Mythology surrounding bikes made from radioactive Russian titanium. Most of the recovered material became golf driver heads.

Gary Helfrich Arctos Machine

Re:But dont forget....

[grammar nazi]

Thank you, Tycho, for the informative comment.

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.