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How To Tell If It's Really Titanium
With the growing popularity of titanium, some disreputable merchandisers are passing off other materials as the more expensive metal. Popular Science looks at a surefire way to prove what that credit card/crowbar/ring is really made of. "Hold any genuine titanium metal object to a grinding wheel (even a little grindstone on a Dremel tool will do), and it gives off a shower of brilliant white sparks unlike any softer common metal. The sparks are tiny pieces of cut titanium--the friction of the grinder heats them till they burn white-hot. Hold a grindstone to the shackle of a "titanium" padlock from Master Lock, however, and you'll instead see the telltale fine, long, yellow sparks of high-carbon steel."
The method in TFA sounds like it would really scratch up whatever you're trying to test. Is there a way to run a test without damaging the object?
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This is very much a point where Hanlon's Razor can be applied.
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Well you see, this is slashdot. Offtopic is actually a way to take out anger from your dog/cat/wife not putting out
So basically, -1 troll/offtopic is really slashdots way of saying "I hate that you thought of something before me."
If you know of a more reliable way, I'd like to hear about it. No, seriously.
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It has good tensile strength and low weight but few applications warrant the additional expense.
Wrong. Several I can think of. Here's a couple that I have personal experience with.
Bicycles. A Ti bike is a noticeably different ride than other materials.
Eyeglasses. Steel contains quite a bit of nickel. Many people are allergic to it, and get a rash when in constant contact with it. So, in eyeglasses, you have a choice between regular steel, Ti, or plastic. Guess which wins.
Iron isn't always magnetic, when heated to or above it's normalization temperature it loses it's magnetic properties, you can hold a piece of steel suspended with an electrimagnet in a kiln and heat it, when it reaches it's normalization temp it will fall to the kiln floor.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
All the titanium hype is just pure marketing BS anyway.
They're capitalizing on the idea that titanium is high-tech and expensive. Which it is. But that's relative steel
and aluminum. Aluminum costs about $2,500 a (metric) ton. Titanium, on the order of $50,000/ton. Contrast that to gold, which'll cost you around $25,000,000/ton.
So titanium jewellery? I'll pass. In fact, I read an article where a metals wholesaler said that he didn't even bother to charge for the small amounts used for designer jewellery.
It's all just a marketing stunt. Titanium isn't actually better than the metal it's replacing a lot of the time. To take an example, I saw an expensive titanium camp stove (as opposed to aluminium). The stupidity of that, besides being heavier, is that titanium sucks as a heat conductor, in particular in comparison to aluminum (what's your CPU heatsink made of?)
Instead of asking themselves "Is it really titanium?", people need to ask "Why does it need to be titanium?"
If the object is solid, why not use the archimedes principle?
It worked for gold, why not for titanium?
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An abysmal movie (The Abyss) that actually got some physics right but certainly not that bit.