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A Cleaner, Cheaper Route to Titanium
Burlap writes "Using technology developed at MIT, 4-person startup Avanti Metal hopes to reduce the cost of producing Titanium from the current $40 per pound to a mere $3. The article discusses how a special combinations of oxides and electrolysis separates the titanium metal from the Earth's abundant titanium oxide ore."
I always love articles like this when they compare the price of MAKING something with the price of SELLING something. Titanium's sold on a market sort of like oil... prices fluctuate based on demand more than they do based on the cost of production.... if the price of titanium is $40 this year, and was half as much last year... last year it was $20, and I'm SURE that people were making a profit selling that, so it was produced for probably a maximum of $15, probably more like $10/lb.
So yes, this saves money... but it needs to be done in a large scale, 1st. I don't know how they come up with a cost/lb estimate that they consider to be more than VERY ball park estimate... $3 could be $6.
Its substantial savings, but its not like we're going to be able to start planning our houses with titanium frames in a few years or anything. And that's assuming that demand doesn't keep skyrocketing above supply... in which case we could have the same price (or more!) regardless of how much it costs to produce titanium.
Tim
I took Sadoway's class last year. Awesome guy -- this is right up his alley (making things more environmentally friendly).
Here's a PDF presentation on the process:
http://web.mit.edu/dsadoway/www/MOE_Ti.pdf
This
The concept is not new: basically the same as the Hall cell for aluminium production. But, I believe finding a suitable salt is not that easy. In the case of aluminium, cyrolite is used. In titanium, what's the suitable one? Suppose you mix Ti2O3 with another metal salt, you may get another metal instead of Ti. Needless to say, the whole electrolysis process gets quite messy at 1500+ degC.
I don't have first-hand knowledge of this but supposedly the Ti in wheelchairs has the property of acting like a shock absorber while at the same time not compromising rigidity at all over Al. Also, like 20-25% lighter than comparable Al. I imagine it would be the same for bicycles(?), etc.
Looks like Sadoway may just be on his way to that Nobel prize he's been obsessed with. :P
n gineering/3-091Fall-2004/LectureNotes/index.htm
For those that aren't familiar with MIT's most pimp chem prof you can enjoy a full semester of his lectures right here: http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Materials-Science-and-E
You gotta find first gear in your giant robot car
Twice as strong vs 1.6 times as heavy, higher melting point, better resistance to corrosion and fatigue.
rj
Titanium doesn't corrode as much, and it's non-poisonous. It's one of the few things that is safe to implant in a human body. The oxide is use to make foods white.
Meanwhile, aluminum has issues. At best it makes your soda taste yucky after a while. Maybe it contributes to Altzheimer's disease. If you cook tomatoes in an aluminum pan, you'll get holes in the pan.
Hey Kab, Tawnos here, I think this is the first time I've seen one of us on /., and I read daily.
Echoing his thoughts a bit, I, too, make maille. My 6-1 titanium vest has an estimated 500-600 dollars worth of metal in it, with many grades of Ti, from Grade 2 (aka CP "commercially pure") to Grade 5 (aircraft grade, an alloy that's much stronger).
I feel it is necessary to dispell a few myths about titanium. One, it's not stronger than steel, nor even as strong as steel. Pound for pound it is, but not overall. Spring stainless is much tougher than even the grade 5 tempered Ti. Two, it's not especially hard to work with WHEN BENDING. While it is more brittle than steel, the amount of bending we put into a ring to create a piece of maille does not even begin to produce elastic stresses. Three, titanium itself is not that hard, it's the titanium dioxide that forms when it is exposed to air. This dulls tools quickly, and makes machining titanium difficult.
Painbreak: I wouldn't buy it, I make it because it's a labor of love. Something to do in what little free time I have.
Misleb: not chain letters, "maille" is a metal fabric created through the interlinking of rings.
Another cleaner, cheaper route for Titanium production has been developed in Cambridge, UK.
Reach about the FFC Process for Titanium Extraction.
Or eyewear. Titanium: Light, durable, and not too many people that I know of are allergic to it because it's low in allergens. In fact, I wear a pair of DKNY Titanium Frames with "Featherwates" lenses... 0.7 ounces, or roughly 19.84 (ooh spooky) grams!
$fortune
Tomorrow has been canceled due to lack of interest.
You gotta be joking. Titanium has been used in bicycles for years, and in aerospace for decades.
Bought a titanium bike frame made by Teledyne in '74. They used the same facilities to build the bike that they had developed for making Space Shuttle bits. Nobody else has yet made a titanium bike quite like this one because Teledyne was able to make everything, such as tubing and fork crowns, custom in house, without relying on purchasing parts. I miss that bike. Traded it for a steel Cinelli. Took 28 seconds of my 10 mile TT PB the first time I rode it. Stiffness never was one of the virtues of the Teledyne, but it rode like a dream. The best long hauler I've ever ridden. Could have used some damping material injected into the fork or something. It could flex sympathetically on washboard roads.
Been thinking about getting a Spectrum, which is actually made by Merlin to Tom Kellog's specs, but I've known Ben Serotta since he was a 21 year old kid opening his first bike shop, and he started making titanium frames awhile ago and I figure I should give them look over.
Shit's old hat.
KFG
And it maintains it's strength at high temperatures. Steel tends to weaken quite a bit as it gets hot.
This is why titanium is used in things like the turbine blades of jet engines, and the leading edges of supersonic aircraft.
About two years ago the folks at Oxford University developed a process for producing the metal from
its common ore more cheaply that the process commonly in use. I think it's now being tested
commercially at at least one company here in the U.S. I'ld bet that the MIT process is very
similar to the one developed at Oxford.
Titanium oxide is commonly used as a white pigment for paints.
The Sheffield was lost in the Falkland Islands conflict. It is popularly beleived that this was due to the alumiminum superstructure catching fire. However, it seems that the Sheffield did not have an aluminum superstructure and the Sheffield was lost for other reasons.
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http://www.hazegray.org/faq/smn6.htm#F7
http://www.alfed.org.uk/templates/alfed/content.a
It is also worth noting that any metal can catch fire if you get it hot enough, even steel.
Several reasons:
1. Insulation; titanium is less condutive of heat/electricity. This can be a benefit or detriment depending on the application.
2. Strength; the same amount of Ti/Al alloys to support a specific load can be made with a lighter weight of Ti. An equal volume of Ti is heavier than Al, though.
3. Fatigue life; titanium, like iron, has infinite fatigue life. Aluminum does not. What this means is you can make a spring from Ti but Al will fail if repeatedly stressed.
4. Corrosion; titanium is more corrosion resistant than Al because it oxidizes rapidly in contact with air
5. Social reasons; titanium has significantly more percieved value than Al, moreso than the material differences. Further Ti has a unique color as well.
Sometimes aluminum will still be better; in many applications the relative strength difference doesn't matter and thus a lighter equivalent volume of Al is advantageous. Also, the high conductivity of Al is a good thing in many situations.
The most common Ti alloy, Ti-6Al-4V, actually has 6% Al in it.
No, what made Aluminum(aluminium) valuable was whoever figured out how to cast it in a mold without leaving the funky wavy lines in the casting where the aluminum didn't "flow" against the mold completely. Before that, it was a curiosity, because all those funky mold defects really weakened it even more.
Of course they are carefully looking at the AMERICAN price for titanium production..
It is much much cheaper in Russia, as it is basically produced as a side effect of steel production there due to the different ores available.
Most significant titanium users source their titanium from Russia, and there is little interest in other sources as Russia just has the right ores anyway.
Oh well, good try though.
Hmm, 1700C is the temperature a normal (non-energy saving) light bulb works at. At 1700 the efficency is terrible (around 1%). To make light bulbs more efficent, you 'merely' need to increase the temperature. The problem is finding materials that you can do this with.
To increase the temperature you need a material that won't oxide, react, etc at high temperatures. The best material is tungsten. However this does rapidly corrode. Hallogen lamps and energy saving light bulbs use this. The tungsten is heated to 2400C. At this temperature it has an efficency of almost 4%. However the tungsten corrodes very rapidly. Halogen lamps have the bulb bit made out of quartz, which makes the halogen air inside react with the tungsten that has corroded off, and pushes it back on to the tungsten. So the corroded tungsten is continually put back on.
Going above 2400C is not simple. Tungsten has a melting temperature of 3400C, but you would need to deal with the corroding at a fantastic rate. Also tungsten is fantastically expensive and rare.
The cost of producing Titanium isnt even the 5th most prominent reason that it's not used more. Here's a few more significant reasons:
given the choice of using steel or aluminum, versus using titanium at 100x the cost, 10x the likelyhood of the part breaking if touched by the wrong stuff, most engineers will go with anything but titanium.
Thats incorrect. Any good steel shear, including the wiss tinsnips in my tool drawer, will cut a titanium ring apart easily. Titanium may have a better strength to weight ratio than steel, but steel is much harder at simular or even smaller actual size and as such will easily shear titanium.
I'm currently working at a company specializing in Ti and Ti alloys/composites.
I have little to no faith in this actually producing anything substantial within the next several years.
Why? I have read about this same guy pitching his process for the past several years, and my company has a file on him going back almost a decade; he's been saying his process will yield results 'soon' for far too long for me to readily believe him.
Last year, even, I read a presentation he gave, and it consisted of little more than a brief high-school chemistry explanation of electrolysis (which is all this is, same process that produces hydrogen and oxygen from water) and stating a hope that they will build an experimental cell soon. Apparently he's gotten that far, but 200 mg aren't going to help much to combat the currently sky-rocketing Ti prices.
And yes, they are very high right now. Half our work is focused on improving Ti recycling processes so that scrap can be used more widely; the rest of the work is biomedical applications where cost is not an issue.
The point is: Yes, if this works it could mean a much cheaper/environmentally friendly (I'm a little doubtful of this; yea, there won't be concentrated TiCl or Cl gas lying around, but it's an electrolytic process, it will use lots of electricity, and that will produce extra waste) process. This is a conceptually simple process; basically it requires experimentation to get the parameters right. He has spent very little time actually experimenting.
Halogen lamps have the bulb bit made out of quartz, which makes the halogen air inside react with the tungsten that has corroded off, and pushes it back on to the tungsten. So the corroded tungsten is continually put back on.
o gen_lamp
Close, but not quite. The bulbs are made of quartz because it can withstand the heat much better than a thin glass envelope. The quartz has nothing to do with the tungsten redisposition. The tungsten redisposition is because of the reaction with the halide gas that the bulb is filled with (iodine or bromine). This is natrually where the name "Halogen" comes from.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halogen_lamp#The_hal
SirWired
Steel *can* be harder, but it isn't necessarily.
Pure ti ranges from 35,000 PSI to 100,000PSI yield strength, depending on the route of manufacture. Some ti alloys go as high as 250,000PSI. (Converted from the article's 1725 MPa datapoint.)
I've found references to steel having a yield strength in excess of 2000 MPa, but Wikipedia claims that titanium alloys are harder.
With all that said, I cut ti with a hacksaw, and snips for sheet, on a regular basis. It's no problem. It's *much* harder to cut than gold or silver, and somewhat more than platinum, so *standard* ring-cutting tools might not, well, cut it, but any jeweler can get a sawblade through the inside of a ti ring and cut it in under half a minute.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
I work in a machine shop and I am an EMT.
We work with Titanium all the time in the shop. We have learned what works and what doesn't. Some of our machinists actually like working with Titanium. They tell me for instance, that it turns nice on a lathe for them. Not gummy like aluminum.
Cutting a ring of someone's finger in an ER is a different story. Ring cutters were designed with soft metals, like gold and silver, in mind. ER can pop a normal gold wedding band quick as a flash with a ring cutter. A platinum or titanium band is significantly harder than gold or silver and their ring cutter may not work. True, the maintenance guy may have something in his toolbox that will work, but your nurse or doctor in the ER may not think about it. Also remember, ring cutters are designed to protect your finger from the blade as your ring is cut off. The maintenance guys wire cutters aren't.
There are ring cutters on the market that can cut titanium, but they aren't common in hospital settings yet. The old manual ring cutters are $10-20 each. The new electric ones are an order of magnitude more expensive.