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New Technology Produces Cheaper Tantalum and Titanium
Billy the Mountain writes "A small UK company is bringing new technology online that could reduce the prices of tantalum and titanium ten-fold. According to this piece in The Economist: A tantalising prospect, the key is a technique similar to smelting aluminum with a new twist: The metallic oxides are not melted as with aluminum but blended in powder form with a molten salt that serves as a medium and electrolyte. This technology is known as the FFC Cambridge Process. Other metals include Neodymium, Tungsten, and Vanadium."
someone in Russia just went nuts
"A small UK company is bringing new technology online that could reduce the prices of tantalum and titanium ten-fold."
Online... Will it make the tantalum and titanium down-loadable also?
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
The FFC Cambridge process was developed by George Z. Chen, Derek J. Fray and Tom W. Farthing between 1996 and 1997 in the University of Cambridge.
I realize /. is a little behind the times, but 17 years behind?
Are we going to have stories about Wright brother's magical flying machines next?
is not the manufacturing. it's "working" it.
Looking for people to chat about multicopters, coding, music. skype: gtsiros
Perhaps with enough investment, his dreams could become true?
Protip: businesses that have a ready market crying out for the products that they claim to be able to make cheaply don't need to be spending time talking to the press.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
new technology that could reduce the prices of tantalum and titanium ten-fold.
Noooooo, my huge cache of veldspar will become worthless! Oh titanium, not tritanium..... never mind.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
Reduce the prices ten-fold
Really? I think you're trying to say "reduce by 90%".
Or you could have just quoted TFA : "for less than a tenth of such powderâ(TM)s current price". But that's The Economist, their editors actually care about both the English language and making sense.
Seriously, do the people posting these stories ever read TFA?
"The metallic oxides are not *melted as with aluminum* but blended in powder form with a molten salt that serves as a medium and electrolyte."
Wrong! The Hall-Héroult process (main Al production method) is exactly that! Dissolving alumina in molten cryolite to allow electrolysis without heating to alumina's melting point.
So actually the apparent amazing breakthrough turns out to be, "oh hey, they found a new solvent to dissolve things in".
Accurate facts please guys, leave the sensationalising by omission to the tabloids.
"A small UK company is bringing new technology online that could reduce the prices of tantalum and titanium ten-fold.
When all said and done, who doesn't like cheap tan and tits
Don't worry buyers; the manufacturers will be sure to pass this four-fold cost reduction on to you, their valued customer!
It could literally change the world.
Titanium--which is actually common in the soil--is an amazingly strong metal that is also quite corrosion resistant and can withstand very temperatures. Even with the expensive production processes used up till now, titanium was favored by the aerospace industry because of its strength and heat resistance and for making propeller blades for ship screws because they withstood the corrosive effects of seawater.
With a vastly cheaper production process, it could make it possible to substantially lighten the weight of automobiles--which has the benefit of either lower petrol/diesel fuel consumption or needing a smaller battery pack (in the case of electric cars). And it means high-speed trains can be vastly lighter while still meeting safety standards for passenger train cars, which means smaller and more efficient traction motors on electric multiple unit (EMU) passenger trains.
This new technology would become obsolete as soon as we find a good source for unobtainium. But the smart money is on the administranium that would thwart any competitor from emerging.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
At CURRENT extraction rates there's less than a 50 year supply so making the processing cheaper will just make it run out faster.It's possible some new sources will be found, but no apparent ones are on the horizon.
Would be almost the start of a titanium revolution in industry. It would reduce the cost of everything from boat propellers to aircraft to bicycles.
... Wake me up when it happens in some important country, like the US.
P.S. We won't use it in any case. Because it wasn't invented it over here. Until we say it was. I 'll get onto the Wiki about that this afternoon...
Adamantium is to hard to work with. It's a bitch when it cools. :(
The world needs cheaper unobtanium, the big blue Smurfs put up a good fight.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Most people, even on slashdot, don’t realize the huge potential of titanium.
It's not only a better metal, it's perfect. In fact, if you mixed together aluminum and stainless steel together and tap the result with a magic wand to remove all its flaw (Resistance to corrosion, acid, rust etc.), you'll get titanium.
Its light as aluminum, strong as steel, completely resistant to corrosion and quite abundant (given, it's not as abundant as iron and aluminum, but it's not that far either. You'll be surprised how much we use Ti in our everyday product). In fact, Ti as the "highest strength-to-weight ratio of any metal" (Reference: Wiki). And we're not even talking about alloy yet.
Still, it got two main flaws:
- First it's price. Because the Kroll process (actual process to make Ti) waste Magnesium, Ti cost a lot more than it should. But the new process should drop that problem if it ever enters mass production. And even if it'll always be more costly than aluminum or iron, don't forget that you need way less material to get the job done
- The second flaw is the hash manufacturing process. Because of many factor like the Titanium thermal conductivity, it's a pain to manufacture. But the new advance in 3D printing "could" completely remove that flaw
I may be a dreamer, but the day where you'll buy 3D printed Titanium shovel from your Walmart may not be that far.
Elok
The search for cheap Ti has been going longer than Hunter and Kroll. They have tried all kinds of vapor phase and liquid salt reductions. Even if this new process worked you would not see cheap Ti. The purification and processing of Ti tends to be a pain in the behind. On the other hand I hope it works. A drop in price of 50% would open lots of new markets and uses. The oxide on the outside, like Al, is quite strong which results in Ti (and Ta, and Zr) being a excellent corrosion resistant material.
Of the finished product. That price is determined by the same commodity traders that control the London Metals Market. These are the same thieves that control the price of all commodities. From the corn in your breakfast cereal to the gasoline in your car, the world's economies are held hostage by these speculators.
Isn't it obvious?
Guns. He's making guns. Ones that you can get through airport security without being detected.
You can sell those for an awful lot of money to the right people.
"Old Spice" markets disposable razors claimed to have blades of titanium. They dull very quickly and become effectively useless about 4 times faster than steel.
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This development may lower things for a while and raise demand for a while until more expensive sources are found to replace the cheap ones that ran out quickly (due to increased demand.) This will be the peak for that resource and it'll not ever likely do that again. It may not even peak that much with the delay in production rate increase and the commodity traitors (misspelling intentional.)
The real problem long term is recycling. We don't recycle most materials and won't until they become rare enough or costly enough to make recycling cost competitive. It might be already except that mining land fills is going to need many rare materials to start mining them... especially the ones where communities have been built on top.
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Steel has gotten very expensive as China industrializes, which hurts many industries. Titanium is highly plentiful and if it could compete with steel on even a fraction of its markets then it would help reduce the world's demand. Fun unintended consequences may include a resurgence in building construction.
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Here's a great set of blog posts by a chemist who describes the substances that are so awful or terrifying that he won't work with them. Great stories...
http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/things_i_wont_work_with/
Now I realize retail and wholesale are two different worlds but here in Taiwan retail I just bought 36 meters of 1" diameter 18 guage steel square tubing for about US$72.00. I thought that was quite cheap actually. 36 meters, that's over a hundred feet so about seventy cents a linear foot.
I was just driving down south over the Chinese New Year and I saw nothing but truck after truck carrying steel rolls.
I suspect steel has gotten expensive in some countries and not so much in others. Copper is the same way. Chinese copper is a heck of a lot cheaper than copper in the US. I was going to make some copper fittings and then I priced them from China and I could get them pre-made and shipped for cheaper than I could buy the raw metal in the States.