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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."
"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.
is not the manufacturing. it's "working" it.
Looking for people to chat about multicopters, coding, music. skype: gtsiros
Slashdot is certainly prone to error, so I'm not going to defend this specific case, but it's not uncommon for a 17 year lapse between having a process progressing from an academic discovery to an industrial implementation. Using your example, it was a decade between the first flight and the first scheduled commercial flight (heck, even four years to the first passenger).
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
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.
There is quite a difference between developing a process in a lab and making it industrially available. With your argument, the news about the ENIAC being functional in 1946 was no news, because Alan Turing developed the model of the Universal Machine already in 1936.
one might even say he threw a tantalum
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.
Are we going to have stories about Wright brother's magical flying machines next?
You never know
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
"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.
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
With titanium? Try again, but stop to think a bit this time.
Rethinking email
"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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I can grow corn in my back yard.
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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.
Science & open-source build trust from peer review. Learn systems you can trust.
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/
I do grow corn in my back yard. Actually, moving from the city into the country was somewhat eye-opening. I grow lots of stuff now, I get my eggs from the neighbours hens - for a price way below supermarket standard. Cutting out the middlemen makes for better food and lower prices....
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
I'm assuming that you're new in the countryside, so:
Do remember that corn is nortorious for destroying the soil, and alternate it with, say, beans. My grandfather used a four field system, where one field was cotton, on field was alfalfa, one field vegetables (usually boysenberries, but it varied), and one field was pasture. (Alfalfa counts as a bean. So does vetch. But if you don't have a grazing animal it gets more difficult. Beans would work, though, but that's a lot of beans. For his cotton you could use corn.)
OTOH, I don't know how much land you're talking about, so this may be overkill. For small plots you can plant corn and beans together. But you still need to let things lie fallow (or pasture) occasionally. (Artificial fertilizers don't solve this problem. If you depend on them, you'll destroy your land in a decade or so.)
For that matter, you can raise chickens on the fallow land. That works well, especially for small holdings. But move them around, as chickens will eat every plant they can reach. One good plan is to design your chicken pen to be easily moved, and move it once a week. Chickens aren't too picky, and are quite willing to live on wheels, so an old trailer is good. Particularly if you have one where you can replace the floor with chickenwire. It's hard to beat chicken shit as fertilizer, but it's a bit concentrated. So you move the pen to sit over the area that was just used as a chicken yard, and the chicken yard into an adjoining area that has too many weeds.
OTOH, listen to your neighbors. It's been decades since I lived out in the country. I told you about my grandfather, because *I* didn't do it or want to do it. Still, many people like the countryside. I disliked the continual work. I've got enough ideas of my own to keep me busy, and in the city is closer to bookstores and libraries. These days it's also closer to medical services (we all get older, unless we're unlucky).
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Thanks for the tips, mate. I am indeed new in the countryside, but then again, I am a biochemist by trade, so I get the theory. The practice, as you suggest, I get from the neigbors. We are talking about a rather small plot here - just a kitchen garden, basically. But I am moving the zones - what held corn last year will be beans this year. Also sowed some clover as green fertilizer in the autumn, to be dug under as soon as the soil is dry again. Also, compost. As for the bookstores and libraries - we are talking German countryside here, 10 minutes walk to the light rail connection and 30 minutes into the next major town with shops, museums, a philharmony, a decent theater :) best of both worlds.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
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.
Nice. That sounds closer to the bookstores, etc. than I am.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Well, as I said - Germany. The country is rather compact :) On the other hand - I used to live and work on the west coast in my grad student days. What we don't have here are the vast stretches of still untouched land like I have seen in the Mojave, in the Sierra - population density is just to high here to allow for something like that to still exist. Count your blessings :D
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.