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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."
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
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.
I work with titanium. Buying 500 kg this week. It's not that bad. I'd use more of it if it were cheaper.
You want to talk hard to work with, try gamma titanium aluminide. Blah! And I'm sure there is far worse stuff. Plutonium?
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
one might even say he threw a tantalum
You want to talk hard to work with, try gamma titanium aluminide.
I think gamma titanium aluminide is managing my project.
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.
I think if you were ordering 500kg of plutonium you would just have made the scariest post ever on slashdot.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
"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
Face it, there's probably enough keywords there to have triggered alarm bells at the NSA anyway.
I've only used it for prototypes, but nothing aerospace. Which means either very expensive custom tooling for die casting or machining. And it won't quite machine like metal. Grinding works, but that's slow for complex shapes.
It's not impossible to work with, just weird. Vibrates and makes the strangest sounds while machining.
Now that I think about it, boralyn was worse. Tore up machine tools and gummed up grinding tools. You can cast, forge, and weld the stuff. But none of the parts I work with are amenable to those processes.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
Is your manager brittle, expensive, and prone to making weird noises?
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
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.
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.
I once posted elsewhere about what *I* think would be great subjects for video.slashdot.org, behind the scenes at the computer room of a major observatory for example. I think getting a video tour of your shop might be equally fascinating. Exotic boron and/or titantium alloys and it's not an aerospace application? I'm guessing racing bicycles or Formula 1 fabrication work. Either way, I'd love to see an interview where you discuss what it's like working with these unusual materials.
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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
You can safely hold a lump of the stuff (scientific samples) with your bare hands. It's warm, but otherwise completely safe because it only emits alpha or beta particles (I forget which). You wouldn't want to eat it or breathe in dust from a machining process, however.
moox. for a new generation.