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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."
http://www.techreview.com/printer_friendly_article .aspx?id=16963
Yeah, the ad... not very helpful.
"Don't let fools fool you. They are the clever ones."
No one found this earlier. The Hall-Heroult Process for aluminium is basically the same,and has been known for well over a century.
Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.-- Frontinus, 1st cent. AD
Nobody uses the Titanium. Servers just use a MD Pteron if they want price-performance. And Onroe is just around the corner. Even cheaper Titaniums aren't worth the bother. Ntel can't drop the product line as a matter of face, but consumers just aren't buying it.
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
Sweet! I'm sure this will likely have a significantly higher impact on pretty much all products as is, but this will affect me in a slightly different way. I'm one of the few that make chainmail as a hobby. Titanium chainmail is significantly lighter, rusts less, etc, etc. Significantly better for metalcraft than stainless steel or galvanized steel or anything like that in my opinion.
:}
So, having cheaper working materials = excellent for people like me
Planet Zebeth - Metroid with a twist
Now I can buy the colorful lights for the warp drive engine instead spending all the money on plating the hull with expensive titanium. Warp 1 has never been so cheap!
Thank God! I thought the Steel Age was never going to end!
-Peter
Titanium foil hats HERE WE COME!
For the harddrive and other parts not to break, the laptop better have some sort of buffer to break the fall instead.
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
I say your 3-cent titanium tax doesn't go too far enough!
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
I worked at a titanium manufacturing plant where I analyzed samples for nitrogen contamination. Even though it was a pretty low level repetitive job, I still felt like a scientist working in a lab wearing a lab coat and the head chemist was a guy from Sweden named Jurgen (?sp). I also remember that the titanium tetrachloride was so volatile that just a spoonfull released into the atmosphere would create a huge white cloud and the fire department would show up and management would have to fill out an incident report. Good memories, except for the time I got hydrofluoric acid on my fingers, very painfull, and of course when I accidently breathed in some vapors and had frequent nosebleeds for several years afterwards.
All generalities are dangerous except ones that start with "All
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
Not to be pedantic or anything, but you would actually fare worse in a car wreck in a Titanium car, as it wouldn't give as readily as steel. The more time the impact lasts, the less force the passengers experience. So in a wreck between a titanium Geo Metro and a steel Geo Metro, the passengers of the titanium car could be extracted faster but would be more likely to die. There are more considerations to engineering than just weight and efficiency. If something cant get you from point A to point B as safely as the less-efficient alternative, than the less-efficient alternative bears at least some looking into.
SRSLY.
Your favorite sig sucks
Not to be pedantic or anything, but you would actually fare worse in a car wreck in a Titanium car, as it wouldn't give as readily as steel.
So why don't we make cars out of cotton wool or balsa wood?
You want crumple zones, yes, but surrounding a stiff inner structure. That's why doors have stiff cross-beams in them, race cars have roll cages, etc. No titanium for the crumple zones, sure, but you want it for the roll cage.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
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.
Just jeffin' ya. Sounds like an interesting hobby. Know anyone who makes swords? I've heard that the metallurgy that goes into a modern metal blade is quite impressive, and that modern swords -- despite being made almost entire by hobbyists -- are far superior to the swords of antiquity.
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.
Then why not get a ring made out of Tungsten? It's pretty expensive too and twice as dense as gold.
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.
s p?PageId=111
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.
Mean while the price of titanium anti-corrosion coating will increase from $3 to $40 per pound.
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
Was it he who dropped this info to the startup? Did he also drop the transparency trick too? Please say yes.
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.
Unless you were to construct a nuclear power plant to directly heat the titanium oxide mixture using the reactor pile itself.
a ctor_systems.pdf
Unfortunatley, the world market for radioactive titanium is rather small.
You will need some sort of high temperature heat exchanger that will not, itself, become radioactive. I don't think water will do. Actually, you may have trouble just running the reactor that hot. I think you will need a gaseous core reactor.
http://gif.inel.gov/roadmap/pdfs/non-classical_re
That's rather beyond the current state of the art.
My brother knows one of these modern-day master swordsmakers. One of the new tricks is to use high quality braided cable as a starting material. You flux it or something, then heat and pound. Like starting out with a Damascus or samurai style laminated blade, but woven instead of folded. Sounded pretty cool to me.
Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a soportar Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a espabilar
Sorry, but there's no direct contact between the soda and the metal. The cans are lined with a thin coating of some sort. Otherwise the soda would indeed dissolve the can.
In case you're doubting, here's the experiment that showed me what's up: Wash two soda cans. Score the inside of one of the cans, just a tiny scratch going all the way around, to penetrate the protective coating. Then fill both cans with an acidic solution and let them sit around a few hours. Dump out the acid, and you can tear apart the scored can as if it were paper. Chemistry magic trick.
Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a soportar Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a espabilar
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.
You can tear apart an unscored can as if it were paper. They are really thin these days.
Steel was once used, but we had to switch to aluminum because Coke ate through the steel too fast.
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.
Actually that durability can be one of the biggest problems with Titanium rings, trauma sheers can't cut them so if you have any kind of severe sweeling problem there's a good chance of digit loss because the ER won't be able to remove the ring. That and the fact that my father gave me his ring are the reason I didn't get a titanium one. (He hadn't worn his in 20 years due to working with the machining industry and seeing several people lose their hands in machines due to wedding bands).
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
"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."
What business people read:
"Using technology developed at MIT, 4-person startup Avanti Metal hopes to increase the profit of producing Titanium by $37 a pound!"
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 no geologist but from what I gather for metals to be profitably mined requires deposits with high enough concentrations of the metal to make it worth while. Iron can be found almost everywhere but in certain places it is so concentrated that it is much cheaper to mine and extract (i.e. hematite deposits around the US Great Lakes). Many metal deposits come from place that have experienced volcanic activity in the past where superheated water has carried metal compounds in solution through cracks in rocks. Ultimately you get metal ore "veins". The copper deposits in Cyprus are an example of this . They may have been fundemental to the advancement of civilization in that area. Another hot spot for copper is the Andes which are also riddled with volcanoes. Iron deposits are even older and many were formed by the reduction of iron in water when the first oxygen producing bacteria and algae appeared on earth. The iron deposits around the Great Lakes and in Sweden are in very old rocks. Sweden also happens to be a good source for rare earth metals.
Diamonds are another material that depends on volcanic activity but it requires powerful upwellings of material from near the upper mantle to bring them up. These deposits either have to be mined (South Africa) or can get eroded and washed into river deposits (West Africa).
You won't get metallic lumps of iron (except in meteorites) due to the ease it oxidizes but you can find lumps of copper, silver, and gold in things like quartz viens.
I think the UK's iron industry is not due to the location of Iron (they can get that from Sweden) but due to the coal deposits in Wales that provide the other part of the equation for smelting, energy.
Personally, one thing I'd like to know is why certain places have deposits of uranium. Why just that and not, say, copper too? How did it become seperated from other ores to such a degree?
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
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.
Unless they work in the aerospace industry, in which case every extra pound of airframe weight costs $500 to $1000 a year to lug around for the rest of the airplane's service life (up to 40 years), about the same cost increase for spacecraft expect with those you pay in one lump sum at launch time. Still, titanium use is limited by cost and supply, though by limited I mean about >10% by weight of the upcoming Boeing 787, slightly less (by percent weight) in an Airbus A380.
A titanium part that is built right weighs in at a fraction of a comparable steel part. The cost differences are reduced somewhat because aircraft tend to use stainless steel to get some corrision resistance whereas titanium is essentially corrision-proof in aircraft applications (stainless steel and aluminum are not) and must not be quite as sensitive as you make it seem (or is treatable with proper unlimited-life coatings, I honestly don't know, AE not MME), otherwise they could never let in out on the same ramp as the idiots who like to spear aircraft with the bagagge loaders.
Now what could make this a non-answer to a non-problem is that parts that migrated to titanium years ago for strength/weight purposes are not migrating to carbon fiber composites (>50% of a 787 by weight), though not into areas requiring high temperature operation.
Rockwell numbers are kind of arbitrary. What the hell does 57 on Rockwell C mean in real-world terms? Think about what Rockwell and the like test: you apply a known force to a ball or diamond of a known cross-section and measure the resultant deformation. Force per unit area... is PSI. Or KPa. Those are non-arbitrary terms, or at least they're one level less arbitrary than Vickers or Rockwell numbers. "The yield strength in tension is about 1/3 of the hardness" and yield strengths are measured in KPa (if you're in a civilized country) or PSI (otherwise).
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.