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."

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http://www.techreview.com/printer_friendly_article .aspx?id=16963 [techreview.com]

Yeah, the ad... not very helpful.

Re:I'm surprised

[qbwiz]

I agree, although the temperatures that they say that this process occurs at are almost twice the temperature you need to refine aluminum. That might explain why it was considered practical for aluminum, but not considered for titanium. They did say that they were having problems with heat.

Re:Whoo Hoo

[Tribbin]

For the harddrive and other parts not to break, the laptop better have some sort of buffer to break the fall instead.

Re:Apples and oranges...

[diablomonic]

I agree on the whole "announce a price when we havent even got a commercial demo plant" thing being stupid, but you seem to have missed something. According to the article, supply of titanium is currently very limited due to environmental concerns, while demand keeps going up (and, although I'm not a metalurgist, is there any reason that titanium couldnt replace steel almost entirely if it was cheap enough? thats a lot of demand!). This removes that supply problem entirely if it works of course.

Re:Not exactly

[DeadChobi]

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.

Re:Not exactly

[Eccles]

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.

Re:Apples and oranges...

[PackerX]

This removes that supply problem entirely if it works of course.

Let's think of this from a business standpoint: patent the process. Produce titanium in small numbers to prevent market saturation. Charge the same amount as everyone else, but at 10% the production cost. I don't see the savings being passed to the consumer anytime soon.

Re:Apples and oranges...

[modecx]

In summary, titanium is kept in limited used in industry because it's hard to weld, not because it's expensive.

Just wanted to add to all of the great stuff you said by also pointing out that titanium is also a pain to work with in pretty much every other way. It's tough to machine, it's also a bitch to use as sheet metal--it's springy and not as malleable as steel or aluminum at room temperature. You've often got to heat it signifigantly if you need to make tight bends... Plus, all of that is compounded by the alloys of titanium which are even harder to use and form than the pure stuff.

Re:Apples and oranges...

[bigpat]

Let's think of this from a business standpoint: patent the process. Produce titanium in small numbers to prevent market saturation. Charge the same amount as everyone else, but at 10% the production cost. I don't see the savings being passed to the consumer anytime soon.

Well the patent holder would want to maximise profit, so will have to produce enough to make it worth while. So, this would increase supply at least somewhat and thus likely decrease prices. And it is very likely that the patent holder would just want to license the process to current companies instead of actually getting capital to start their own plant. So, they would have incentive to license the process to as many companies as possible. At which point it only takes one company to decide that it needs to increase production to increase market share in order to have an effect of lowering prices. Of course, there can always be anti competitive price fixing, but that is illegal and can't go on forever.

All a matter of perspective

[Dutchmaan]

"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!"

Re:Awesome!

[Hoi Polloi]

Environmentally friendly isn't just for making tree huggers like me happy, it generally means the elimination of waste, expensive materials, and extra processing that means greater efficiency and lower costs. Chemical plants and foundries are full of nasty processes that can kill or injure employees or even neighbors. Then there are all of old plants that have left toxic swaths of land behind, usually in areas that once were the outskirts of cities but today are smack-dab in the middle of suburbs. The cost of cleaning these up is generally left to the public (tax $) since usually the companies have long since folded. Researchers like Sadoway are helping make industry not just better for the environment (which includes us) but it is also good for profits.

Re:Where do you find these metals (or ores)?

[Hoi Polloi]

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?

Re:Apples and oranges...

[LunaticTippy]

The company might make more money selling 10 times as much at 1/5 the price.

Lower profit margin but more profit.

Re:Yet another non-answer to a non-problem

[theycallmeB]

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.

Re:Inexpensive Russian Titanium..

[John Hasler]

> 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.

The cost of the ore is a minor part of the cost of production of titanium metal.

> 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.

More likely it's th lack of pollution controls.