Cheap yet ultrapure titanium might enable widespread use in industry (2024) | Hacker News Reader

Cheap yet ultrapure titanium might enable widespread use in industry (2024)

phys.org

125 pointswesturner120 comments

Titanium has an undeniable "cool factor" due to its use in aerospace, but everyone needs to understand that this is just a case of material science nerds doing something cool in a lab, and there will be no "widespread use in industry" even if they do fix the other issues mentioned in the article - and even if someone manages to figure out a way to viably scale up the process to an industrial level.

The reason? Titanium sucks to work with.

Machinists hate it, equipment hates it, cutting tools hate it, and it makes shavings that can burn hot enough to go right through equipment and concrete floors. That's what makes titanium parts so expensive, not just the material cost alone. It absolutely has properties that make it a perfect material for specific situations, but making it cheaper to buy definitely won't make titanium a common every day thing.

So - enjoy the science! Give a round of applause for the cool new method this team figured out. And then go back to appreciating how wild it is that titanium parts can even be produced at all, because holy smokes is it a pain in the rear in almost every way...

Titanium fires sure are scary. But there's a good amount of chicken and egg here: expensive material limits demand, which limits progress on manufacturing techniques, which keeps part prices high. I would expect that significant manufacturing method progress would be made if there was a step change in the price of titanium stock.

And I wouldn't overstate the machining difficulty. Sure, it's a pain in the rear, and expensive, but can be done on regular machines with the right tools, techniques, and processes. I've made a couple of titanium parts myself.

But there’s also the base chemistry: titanium doesn’t behave like steel, and the chemical differences are why it is such a pain to work with, not inexperience.

The chemical difference between titanium and steel is mainly that titanium has a much higher reactivity with oxygen and nitrogen, the main constituents of air.

Like with aluminum, this high reactivity is masked in finite products made of titanium, because any titanium object is covered by a protective layer of titanium dioxide.

What is worse in titanium than in aluminum is that titanium has a low thermal conductivity, so a small part of the titanium can become very hot during processing, which does not happen with aluminum, where the remainder of the aluminum acts like a heatsink.

The hot spots that exist on titanium during processing, which do not exist on aluminum during processing, make titanium much more susceptible to reacting with the air or even to starting a fire.

Titanium, even as "commercially pure", has a much higher strength than aluminum, which requires higher forces for machining and increases even more the chances for overheating.

> Like with aluminum, this high reactivity is masked in finite products made of titanium, because any titanium object is covered by a protective layer of titanium dioxide.

My understanding is that rust fails to protect iron the same way. Is that right? If so, why the difference?

Rust can protect iron in that way, bluing is a common process to create a protective rust coating. However rust is fragile and often flakes off thus allowing the process to continue. Other metals their oxide is strong enough to protect the pure inner layers.

This depends on the alloy involved as well. In general though rust is not a good iron protection.

Once rust starts, it is porous & flaky and allows more oxygen to infiltrate and hit the next layer of iron. The reason it is porous & flaky is due to creating a mix of FeO and Fe2O3 which have different crystal structures so it doesn't create a nice protective barrier.

Yes, it is right. The difference is that in the case of aluminium and titanium (but also stainless steel), the oxide grows in a uniform way, covering all the metal. These protective layers are very thin and act as barriers stopping oxygen from reaching the metal underneath.

In case of iron, oxidation occurs at different points on the surface and the oxide layer initially leaves most of the metal exposed. The oxide is also not effective at stopping oxygen, so the rust layers keeps growing until it forms flakes that fall, exposing more of the metal. The process repeats until all the metal is consumed.

Magnesium is similar.

I used to have a magnesium campfire starter. It was a little ingot of magnesium, with a long flint, embedded along one side.

You used your knife to shave some magnesium, then the flint, to set it ablaze.

Worked a treat.

There’s a significant history of government effort to improve working with titanium. Construction physics wrote a nice review [0].

The current level of workability and cost and alloying is after that chicken and egg. Titanium is expensive because it is hard to manufacture, not just hard to work with, which limits demand. Titanium, to what we now know, is what it is. It’s the nature of the material not a lack of investment.

More realistically, the ROI isn’t there for most applications. Good aluminum is pretty darn good, massively easier to work, cheaper, etc. newer super steels have even made serious inroads on titanium parts because of workability and toughness.

[0] https://www.construction-physics.com/p/the-story-of-titanium

Titanium - Chlorine fires are even more magnificent than titanium-oxygen fires. Wet chlorine (>150ppm water) is too corrosive for ferrous metals and titanium is often used for pipes carrying wet chlorine.

If something happens that ignites one of these pipelines there’s absolutely no way to put it out - it has the fuel (titanium) and oxidizer (chlorine) and burns mega-hot until one of them is fully consumed along the entire length of the pipeline. The pipelines can sometimes be shockingly long (1 mile-ish).

> Titanium sucks to work with. Machinists hate it, equipment hates it, cutting tools hate it, and it makes shavings that can burn hot enough to go right through equipment and concrete floors.

The safety and security implementation, including assorted regulations, certificates, processes, regulators and the like, is as neccessary as it's... vexing. :)

I agree with your comment in general, and that it is dangerous and abrasive and generally sucks to machine, but there are ways to get around that. For example you can make a lot of parts by stamping/forming/laser cutting fairly inexpensively. Sure, you'll still deal with titanium's quirks, but it's not a severe issue. For those parts the cost of the titanium is still typically the largest individual cost.

Metallic titanium is already cheaper than copper, and the price ratio between copper and titanium will only increase.

However, as you say, the processing costs from the raw metal to a finite product are much higher for titanium than for most cheap metals, mostly because of its low thermal conductivity (which makes titanium locally hot during processing) and its high reactivity with the atmosphere when hot, which is why the products made of titanium are expensive.

It is unlikely that titanium will ever replace stainless steel in most of its applications, but wherever the lower density of titanium or its better resistance against certain chemicals give great enough advantages, I hope to see more titanium objects.

I certainly like the titanium frame of my reading glasses, which is extremely thin and lightweight, almost invisible, while being much stronger and longer lived than a plastic frame would be.

> and its high reactivity with the atmosphere when hot

Isn't that a problem for everything? That's the nature of heat.

That’s a matter of degree. Iron gets reactive and form some oxide at high temperature. This can be worked around by controlling the atmosphere or adding reducing elements or oxygen traps. Other metals like magnesium just burn, which is much harder to work around. You need to go much higher in temperature than the usual manufacturing conditions to make iron burn in a normal atmosphere.

Molten iron can be poured in open air. Doing that with titanium will yield a distinctly different results.

For metals with high electronegativity, like iron and copper, high temperatures do not necessarily create problems due to greater reactivity than at low temperatures. On the contrary, the oxides of such metals may decompose at high enough temperatures. Moreover, when such metals are mixed with more reactive metals, at high temperatures those will combine preferentially with non-metals like oxygen and sulfur, removing them from the metal of interest.

For metals with high affinity to oxygen, like titanium, aluminum or magnesium, no temperatures attainable during normal processing are high enough to decompose their oxides, but the high temperatures increase by several orders of magnitude the speed of reaction with the air, in comparison with room temperature, where the speed of oxidation of titanium and aluminum becomes negligible immediately after the formation of a protective oxide layer.

Moreover, for such metals it may be more difficult to find even more reactive metals than them, which will extract oxygen from their oxides while not having other undesirable properties, like yttrium was found for titanium in the parent article. Yttrium is a metal with a reactivity not so great as calcium, but greater than magnesium, so also greater than titanium and aluminum. Neither calcium nor magnesium are suitable for removing oxygen from titanium, for various reasons, e.g. low boiling or melting temperatures, so yttrium is likely to create much less problems.

So the effects of heat are not always the same.

I could see cheaper titanium increasing its usage a good bit, only because we already avoid needing it whenever possible already. But overall I agree with you, titanium is significantly lighter than steel, but it isn't meaningfully stronger outside of special use cases, so the extra cost of manufacturing brings little to no value to 95% of steel usecases. Steel is just so easy to work with these days. And if something titanium breaks, its a full replacement of that cast or machined piece because you can't just weld it up with a simple portable welder, while steel can be repaired and modified near anywhere with dozens of relatively cheap and easy to use tools.

It isn't toxic, and that's an advantage that overrides any extra costs.

It's also highly biocompatible so good for things like bone implants.

steel is great except for how easily it rusts. there are regions on the planet where a car shell is rotted out in 10 years. if a shell could be made from titanium you would have a long life vehicle, with environmental and economic savings.

Citation needed. This depends very much on the alloy, but I would expect titanium cars would be forced scrapped after 200,000 miles (most of my cars reached 200k miles before they reached 10 years old) by law because fatigue builds up in normal use and the car is liable to break apart. Aluminum has the same issues and commercial trailers track how much the trailers are used and scrap them.

Steel has the nice property that if you stay under certain stress limits fatigue doesn't built up over time and so you can keep using it as long as you care to (or until salt gets it).

How fast a car will rust depends a lot on the country where it is used an also a lot on whether the owner has a garage where to keep it.

There are many countries where only a small percentage of the car owners also have garages, so the cars stay always outside, in rains and bad weather. Such cars rust completely far quicker than the cars kept in better conditions.

I had a car that I have used for 30 years and many hundred thousand miles, without having a garage. By its end of life, it still had many parts of the original motor, but from the original steel chassis there was nothing left. Every part of it had been replaced several times, due to excessive rust.

There is a lot more than that. Washing a car to get the salt off can make a big difference. Iron can be galvanized to prevent rust. Different alloys rust at different rates. Those are things I know about and I'm not even in the field.

Stainless steel is cheaper than titanium. Even if the price difference between titanium and stainless steel is likely to become smaller, it is most likely that stainless steel will always remain significantly cheaper, especially in the form of alloys where nickel is replaced by manganese and a part of the chromium is replaced by aluminum.

Unfortunately, even stainless steel is considered as too expensive by the car manufacturers, despite the fact that when we consider the total cost over the lifetime of the vehicle, with the need of replacing the rusted parts, the cost of stainless steel could have been less (but then customers would have been repealed by seeing higher upfront costs, without knowing how much they will spend on repairs in the future).

i have titanium: phone frame(with 7 years supports of insides), watch frame, watch brace, sushi sticks, forks, spoons, table knife, frying pans, pen, sunglasses frame, necklace.

it is a lot titanium outthere in retail.

Does this mean I won't get a cheap titanium suit of armour? Could me a game changer for HEMA.

You can get one if you are willing to pay for it. It means there is no reason to think that suit of armour will ever be cheap, and this advance while potentially lowering the costs won't lower it enough.

Then again iron suits of armour are not cheap (though cheaper than titanium), and are mostly useless in the real world - but people have them. If you have the money I won't object you to getting one.

I often wonder how much we could improve on historic items like suits of armour using modern materials and manufacturing.

Look at what the modern military uses. They face the same issues, even if bullets are somewhat different from arrows or swords, you still want to protect the same areas of the body again forces, and the same issues of weight, heat, maneuverability and such vs protection. While the exact compromise changes over time, any armorer in history will understand the compromises and why the modern military armour looks different.

Which is to say I'd expect a modern suit of armour to be made of kevlar.

What I meant was, how much better would a modern version of medieval plate armour be if made from modern materials, vs armour made at the time for medieval combat.

Yep, nope.

BTW - might HEMA have any safety regs, for equipment that could become a Class D fire? There might be hazmat issues transporting such armour by air.

If you're going to use modern tech, why not just go all the way and do fiberglass with thin steel faces or something like that?

maybe like 40 years ago? ive never understood where this comes from...its sort of the same argument machinists in the seventies had when automotive companies were building components with 15% nickel hardening out of dedicated normalizing and heat treat furnaces. tool steel life died a bit, but it wasnt the end of the world.

not anymore really. Kennametal and Sandvik all make insert tooling that will easily cut through Ti. Your multi-axis mills and CNC's will even track the tool wear for you and report when to replace. Titanium is no worse or better in your Haas than any other material in 2025.

and if youre still having problems, EDM will absolutely slice through it like butter.

nobody is working endmills or lathes with dry Ti and toolsteel in 2025. robots drown the piece in coolant and pick the right tools.

Still sounds like tons of reasons to have high final cost, compared to cheaper metals.

How to machine titanium is well known now, but it requires more time and more energy than machining the same object from any other cheap metal.

This is caused by fundamental properties of the metal, so it will not change in the future. Therefore machining titanium will always be more expensive than for steel or aluminum alloys or copper alloys.

Making titanium objects by casting is seldom a possible choice, because that is also much more expensive than for any other cheap metal, due to high melting temperature and the requirement to use an inert atmosphere.

Making titanium objects by plastic deformation is also expensive, because none of the titanium alloys has good ductility. The metals that are cheap to process by plastic deformation are those with a fcc crystal structure, like aluminum, copper and austenitic steel at room temperature, or like most steels at high temperature. The titanium alloys do not have such a crystal structure, so they cannot be deformed a lot without breaking.

One of the few processing methods where the titanium alloys do not have properties that increase the processing cost in comparison with other metals in 3D printing. However 3D printing is a relatively expensive processing method for any metal.

an apple titanium powerbook was pretty cool though

EDIT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBook_G4#Titanium_(2001-20...

I remember talking to a guy I shared an office with like 10 or 15 years ago. He did 3D modeling for jewelry and dentists (as separate gigs, not jewelry on teeth ;) ) and he had access to 3D print titanium with a laser sintering device in the dentist practice.

What he told me is titanium is not expensive, but the problem is with the tooling. Expensive, hard to work with and energy intensive .

Yeah I make jewelry and have made some titanium chains by hand. Absolutely brutal to work with. And don't mess up! You need argon atmosphere to weld/solder it.

It was cheaper than I thought to grab a chunk of 99.9 pure from McMaster but dang it's tough stuff. Tools hate it. It's gummy.

Upshot is it can be anodized at home with stuff almost anyone has.

How do carbide burrs do with hand machining titanium? They do great for me with aluminum and bronze. Never tried titanium or hardened steel.

I've become limited by my process it seems cuz those never crossed my mind. With with amount of time shaping it normally takes id speculate it takes awhile. I have a decent sander and still make sure to cut away as much as possible cuz its gonna take another half hour to get it down if I'm a mm off.(just speaking off the cuff this makes me sound incredibly sloppy lol)

That said, carbide pwns, and if you can secure the piece well there's no reason it wouldn't get it done eventually. The diamond and HSS tips have taken awhile on other things for me unlike what you report with the carbide. I'd love to find out I'm mistaken in my guess.

I don't use a ton of steel but when I do I end up with hardened steel because i end up abrading instead of cutting haha. Might be better for normal stock, idk about already hardened.

Ill just add you can create some wild finishes with the Dremel alternating anodizing, Dremel, polish, Dremel. Using the brush, the cutter, whatever to mess with the surface.

This is very cool indeed, but I laughed when I got to the conclusion:

> A limitation of this work is that the resulting de-oxygenated titanium contains yttrium, up to 1% by mass; yttrium can influence the mechanical and chemical properties of titanium alloy. After solving the yttrium contamination problem…

So the process removes the oxygen but then adds yttrium to the metal in significant amounts. That’s not quite the ultra pure titanium I was promised in the headline.

As always, I hope someone figures out the rest of the problem space. As-is, this looks like trading one problem for another.

I'm not sure if it makes it easier, but there are some differences between the high oxygen titanium alloy and titanium with some yttrium in it that might make it easier to separate?

Presumably when you melt the titanium the yttrium doesn't react, whereas the oxygen dissolved in the titanium alloy at room temperature will form titanium dioxide when it's heated (if I'm reading correctly). So maybe you could "just" separate the molten metal by density afterwards? I'm not sure this would work though. For one, you'd need to avoid re-introducing oxygen contamination, but I guess you could do it under a vacuum (yes "just" spin the molten metal at high speed in a vacuum)?

This would seem to me to beg the question of why not just grind up the titanium in a vacuum to remove the oxygen and then melt it down, so I might be missing something here.

Agreed. The original paper states that they have a technique to remove oxygen from the surface of titanium. If that is the case, grinding could be viable. How hard is it to grind titanium?

…Very hard. It’s titanium. Every work process has to be done with special carbide bits, at half speed, underwater.

Tungsten carbide isn’t it?

I think the titanium on the outside in the slag is the easy part, and not included in the 1% figure, which is on the inside.

"can influence" means either that science doesn't know yet how yttrium influences the alloy properties, or that the journalist didn't ask.

Or the scientist read the room and decided being vague was the best option.

Grade 2 Sponge Titanium (USD/mt) = $6,087.03

Yttrium: 28.9 USD/kg is 2890 USD/mt

So the 1% Yttrium might be financially reasonable (assuming extra demand can be met). Prices from metal.com

Sounds like a ‘find a useful titanium/??/yttrium alloy’ situation.

I’m shocked that yttrium is dearer than smelted titanium.

Those figures show Yttrium is about half the price of Titanium metal.

I was shocked at how cheap Yttrium is (I searched for pricing because I thought the 1% might be too expensive). Now I want to buy some...

Not cheap.

Ah shit. I can't shift zeros. 1% of 28900 $/mt is $289. [Yeah: My initial assumption was that Yttrium is really expensive - and it fucking is - I ignored my own smell test - I should have caught my mistake].

That is say 5% of the current final price of Ti (ignoring purity) to end up with something with less oxygen but 1% fucked with Yttrium. You can't just increase price by percentage points for highly competitive commodities. You especially can't add dependencies on elements that are in limited supply and supply controlled/constrained by politics.

So this looks like another academic bullshit result that totally ignores economical realities.

Ah, that was a typo. Not dearer.

I think you made a mistake converting units, 28.9 USD/kg = $28900 per ton.

Thank you for the correction and also for helping me realize they meant "metric ton" (t).

what's mt?

It means metric ton, different to US and GB imperial tons.

> this looks like trading one problem for another.

Every choice trades one problem for another. At a minimum, the new problem is the cost in resources - time, money, personal energy (and in business, usually reputation risk and political capital) - but usually the cost is much more than that, especially when looking at alternative technical solutions. In advice to clients I always present the options as the minimum trade-off (it's my job to minimize it).

More generally, the question is, which scenario of outcomes do you want? It could be the scenario with 1% yttrium is far better than the one with oxygen, or that the ytrrium scenario has a very different set of costs and benefits which make it valuable for certain needs that the oxygen scenario doesn't fulfill. It could be that methods for removing yttrium are already mature and only need to be applied to this case.

But especially in this case, the report is about research & development. If there were no more problems to solve then it wouldn't be R&D. It's really self-defeating to criticize progress in R&D because some problems remain. 'We scored a goal, but that's just trading one problem for another - the other team has the ball!'

> Every choice trades one problem for another.

The problem in this case is that the headline claimed “ultra pure titanium” and the closing paragraph had a tiny oh-by-the-way mention that the process contaminates the titanium with yttrium.

Which is to say, makes it anything but ultra pure. :)

> It could be that methods for removing yttrium are already mature and only need to be applied to this case.

Sorry but no. That’s specially a problem they highlighted as needing a solution.

I was more terrified by the yttrium fluoride. That rings a pancreatic cancer bell very loudly. Additionally, you can be sure that people who understand much more chemistry than biology (or who might have accepted their own deaths) are going to make... different tradeoffs

That said, I welcome others to look into substituting, eg, aluminum for yttrium in these methods (since titalum is already a thing)

Aluminum would not be a substitute for yttrium. Aluminum can be used to deoxidize less reactive metals, like iron. For a metal like titanium, you need a metal that is much more reactive than it. Yttrium is more reactive than magnesium, though less reactive than calcium, which is why it has been chosen.

Moreover, aluminum is undesirable in titanium implants, even if many surgeons without scruples have used cheaper Ti-Al-V alloys taken from aviation suppliers, instead of more expensive alloys designed specifically for compatibility with living tissues, despite the fact that it was always pretty clear that such Ti-Al-V alloys are not suitable for long-term implants.

Yttrium is also not desirable for implants, so the titanium produced by this method is not good for implants, but it is good for most other applications of titanium, where yttrium is not harmful.

Where would yttrium be harmful, if you happen to know?

It is likely that most of the titanium deoxidized with yttrium would not be used as such, but it would be used for producing titanium alloys.

For each kind of titanium alloy, depending on its chemical composition and on its intended crystal structure, yttrium may happen to be harmful or beneficial. Yttrium atoms are significantly bigger than titanium atoms. This can influence the crystal structure and the mechanical properties of the alloys, even with only a small percentage of residual yttrium.

Almost pure non-alloyed titanium (which normally contains residual quantities of oxygen and iron) is used in applications where chemical resistance is more important than mechanical resistance, e.g. for medical implants, vessels and pipes exposed to various chemicals, spoons, metal parts that will be in contact with a human body, e.g. rings or bracelets etc.

Yttrium may diminish somewhat the chemical resistance of titanium for such applications, but the resistance might still be adequate for many of these applications.

Delving into the paper: Al has defo been used for deoxidizing Ti but they claim it's "inadequate"

The stability of al oxyhalide with respect to al oxide and al halide is the key here? Not sure if that has been "adequately" explored either, especially in experiment

(For the sake of more collaborative conversations on HN, not just dissfests :)

> Sorry but no. That’s specially a problem they highlighted as needing a solution.

Do you know anything about it? As far as the article goes, they just said it will be ready for production when the problem is solved, not how hard it is.

Isn't yttrium sometimes added to increase the strength of titanium, anyway?

Titanium dioxide is about 40% oxygen by mass. Converting that to 1% of something else seems like it's doing something.

Yttrium is a more benign contaminant.

Very small amounts of oxygen in titanium are enough to make it too hard and too fragile for most applications.

Adding less harmful impurities to bind the more harmful impurities that cannot be otherwise removed (a.k.a. gettering) has always been a major purification technique, both in metallurgy and in semiconductor technology.

Steel is purified in the same way from the more harmful impurities, by adding other impurities like calcium, silicon or manganese or rare-earth metals.

In some cases, the compounds that result from adding impurities may be removed later, e.g. like slag floating on molten steel, but in other cases they may remain in the metal or semiconductor that is the desired end product.

It remains to be seen whether the extra yttrium and yttrium oxide that remain in titanium are harmful enough to make it worth to attempt to remove them somehow. In some cases they may even have beneficial properties, though e.g. for dental implants I would want commercially pure titanium that does not have any other metallic impurities like yttrium (commercially pure titanium includes small amounts of oxygen and of iron, both of which have no harmful effects in living tissues).

In "Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed", which is a great read, there is discussion of the incredibly difficult time they had setting up tooling for working with titanium. This remains largely true today. Making things at any scale in titanium, while controlling cost is very, very difficult. Even if the titanium itself is gotten very cheaply.

Most of what they figured out about working with it is still very close to the best we can even unreasonably manage

> Unfortunately, producing ultrapure titanium is significantly more expensive than manufacturing steel (an iron alloy) and aluminum, owing to the substantial use of energy and resources in preparing high-purity titanium. Developing a cheap, easy way to prepare it—and facilitate product development for industry and common consumers—is the problem the researchers aimed to address.

"Direct production of low-oxygen-concentration titanium from molten titanium" (2024) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-49085-4

Any comments from someone in the metals industry? The paper shows this process being done at lab scale. It needs to be scaled up to steel mill size. How hard does that look?

Just gotta solve the yttrium issue and it’s ready for prime time. Maybe they could introduce a sort of spider to consume the yttrium…

there may be no yttrium issue

from wiki: Small amounts of yttrium (0.1 to 0.2%) have been used to reduce the grain sizes of chromium, molybdenum, titanium, and zirconium.[81] Yttrium is used to increase the strength of aluminium and magnesium alloys.[15] The addition of yttrium to alloys generally improves workability, adds resistance to high-temperature recrystallization, and significantly enhances resistance to high-temperature oxidation (see graphite nodule discussion below).[68]

Yttrium can be used to deoxidize vanadium and other non-ferrous metals.[15] Yttria stabilizes the cubic form of zirconia in jewelry.[82]

Yttrium has been studied as a nodulizer in ductile cast iron, forming the graphite into compact nodules instead of flakes to increase ductility and fatigue resistance.[15] Having a high melting point, yttrium oxide is used in some ceramic and glass to impart shock resistance and low thermal expansion properties.[15] Those same properties make such glass useful in camera lenses.[51]

Medical

What a useful question though. I hadn't realized that the cost of titanium is due to lack of a process for removing oxygen.

What is the most efficient and sustainable alternative to yttrium for removing oxygen from titanium?

process(TiO2, …) => Ti, …

From teh Gemini 2.5 Pro AI "expert", with human review:

> For primary titanium production (from ore): Molten Salt Electrolysis (Direct Electrochemical Deoxygenation, FFC Cambridge, OS processes, etc.) and calciothermic reduction in molten salts

> They aim to [sic.] revolutionize titanium production by moving away from the energy-intensive and environmentally impactful Kroll process, directly reducing TiO 2 and offering the potential for closed-loop systems.

> For recycling titanium scrap and deep deoxidation: Hydrogen plasma arc melting and calcium-based deoxidation techniques (especially electrochemical calcium generation) are highly promising. Hydrogen offers extreme cleanliness, while calcium offers potent deoxidizing power.

...

> Magnesium Hydride Reduction (e.g., University of Utah's reactor)

> Solid-State Reduction (e.g., Metalysis process)

Are there more efficient, sustainable methods of titanium production?

Also, TIL Ti is a catalyst for CNT carbon nanotube production; and, alloying CNTs with Ti leaves vacancies.

> with human review

What human?

> From teh Gemini 2.5 Pro AI "expert", with human review:

You don't know enough about the subject to answer the question on your own, do you? So your "review" is really just cutting and pasting shit you also don't understand, which may or may not be true.

Thanks for your service.

Do you have a factual dispute with what I posted?

Are any of those alternatives hallucinations, in your opinion?

I feel uncompleted to further assist these.

> Do you have a factual dispute with what I posted?

I don't have nearly enough knowledge or experience in the subject to talk about the factual accuracy of what you posted. The whole point of my comment was, neither do you.

So, to your knowledge there is no factual inconsistency with what I have posted?

You have made an assumption that I didn't review the content that I prepared to post. You have alleged in ignorance and you have disrespectfully harassed without due process.

I did not waste your time with spammy unlabeled AI BS.

I have given my "review search results" time for free; and, in this case too, I have delivered value. You made this a waste of my time. You have caused me loss with such harassment. I have not caused you loss by posting such preliminary research (which checks out).

Did others in this thread identify and share alternative solutions for getting oxygen out of titanium? I believe it was fair to identify and share alternative solutions to the OT which I (re-) posted because this is an unsolved opportunity.

I believe it's fair and advisable to consult and clearly cite AI.

Why would people cite their use of AI? Isn't that what we want?

Which helped solved for the OT problem?

Given such behavior toward me in this forum, I should omit such insightful research (into "efficient and sustainable alternatives") to deny them such advantage.

This was interesting to me and worth spending my personal time on also because removing oxygen from graphene oxide wafers is also a billion dollar idea. Does "hydrogen plasma" solve for deoxidizing that too?

From someone in the product design/manufacturing space - this wouldn't change much. The problem with titanium isn't the material cost (which is expensive, but could be justified in a variety of scenarios) but rather everything else about it. Its an absolute pain in the rear to work with, your manufacturing base is tiny, specialized equipment and tooling is needed, it makes tiny little incendiary devices when being cut, etc.

Its cool, and it has plenty of applications where it is the only choice. But those applications already use it, and lowering the material cost isn't going to make more designers decide to just start using it on a whim.

(PS - This could be more useful if titanium 3d printers start becoming more accessible. But again, that's a low volume manufacturing process so the material costs still don't play much into final part cost.)

With lower material costs, more mundane applications might appear, but probably not all that many. 3D printed titanium eyeglass frames are already a thing, though.

Here's three generations of Space-X's Raptor engine.[1] The last one is mostly 3D printed. There are layers of different materials, and one is a titanium layer. Notice how the plumbing was simplified for each generation.

Rocket engines are mostly plumbing. The fuel is used to cool the engine bell before it is used for power. Everything has cooling cavities inside. All that interior geometry is ideal for 3D printing. In the NASA glory days, those things were built by hand welding large numbers of machined pieces into an engine. Look at that Raptor engine on the right. Everything below the pumps is all one big part. No joints, no welds, no brackets, no plumbing fittings. Nice.

[1] https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2024/08/spacex-reveals-raptor-...

Everything is urgent: "There is thus an urgent need to develop a high-speed and efficient refining method to realize the mass production of low-cost Ti."

Looks like they applied for a patent here: https://patentscope.wipo.int/search/en/detail.jsf?docId=WO20...

Nitinol has been haunting me since 1977 or so. It is such a cool alloy. When I first heard of it, very little had been done with it, and now it is used in many areas. I have yet to come up with any killer use of it on my own though......

I shall be buried, incinerated, cast into the sea or whatever, but my cold dead hands won't ever willfully release my titanium SnowPeak mug. Even if I don't need fluids in the afterlife, I'll keep it filled with space, or anything I can stuff in it. Perhaps I'll live in it, but I do adore the cup. Fit enough to traverse the universe in, by my standards.

Works great on tea, plain H20 and anything I've put in it. Non reactive as far as I can tell and rugged too.

> Works great on tea

What kind of tea? I did some (controlled but not blind) experiments a few years ago, and a titanium Snow Peak mug won the contest for rapid conversion of tasty green tea into a flavorless but similar colored substance hands down.

I do not actually believe that titanium is non-reactive to food, although it’s not aggressively reactive with tomatoes the way that aluminum or cast iron is.

Oolong, loongching, typical blacks, a red I can't pronounce (tsin hong?), herbals...

Long ago when I had a reliable source for organic dragonwell, my favorite tea, I found it did perfectly. I admittedly may have compromised sensory, though I'm sincerely surprised (not skeptical) of your results.

It is probably me, as my benchmark for the best greens are, that left to steep, the leaves sink and do not float. And yes, I'm aware that it's said to increase heavy metal content of the brew. And yes, I'm also aware that this violates the tealitist convention.

However, imposter cups and imitations, which brands I won't name, I'd hesitate to use as bed pans.

Edit: it's worth adding that I almost never scrub it or use soap. The interior is stained, presumably with tannins

I would believe that the patina of organic stuff protects the tea from the metal. I tested on a thoroughly cleaned Snow Peak mug, and I even tried to passivate it with citric acid to no effect.

Passivation...

I definitely hit my cheap stainless containers with passivation, but hadn't thought to with titanium. Glad you mentioned it though, as someone is bound to pass by and learn of the concept and hopefully benefit from it, which I think can be pretty important with cheap stainless, for health purposes.

I’m not convinced that passivating a titanium cup would have much if any effect. Chemicals like citric acid remove iron, and there shouldn’t by any appreciable amount of iron on the surface to begin with. I also don’t know whether the undesired (to me) green tea reaction is with titanium metal or with titanium dioxide.

It could be interesting to experiment with anodized titanium. Apparently, one can fairly easily build up moderately thick oxide layers with various properties.

My attempts to anodize have been exclusively with aluminum, using primitive if not directly stupid methodology. The results were trivial, with a formidable mess.

Anodization is really awesome when done properly. At the risk of exposing my inner moron, I must admit I was not aware that titanium was a candidate.

It's so easy at home! You probably have a suitable acid in either your kitchen, medicine cabinet or garage. Lots of safe materials that can go down the drain, and they give slightly different results. Just degrease well for an even finish.

(I suppose the biggest expense is 9volts or a power supply but I am a guitar player so I just use my mostly spent pedal ones)

I used a few 9v batts and PhDown. I didn't tweak the voltage for any specific colors, but just aimed for a protective coating. The results were disappointing and probably produced more value in hydrogen than anodization. I might try again if I ever craft something else of aluminum that requires protection.

Aluminum is more challenging, I meant ti if I wasn't totally clear. I hope to do it someday too tho.

If you want something way bigger but still ultralight and single-walled, Vargo Bot HD or Vargo BOT XL are like a larger version with a screw top threaded titanium lid (uses a silicone o-ring to seal).

>> A limitation of this work is that the resulting de-oxygenated titanium contains yttrium, up to 1% by mass; yttrium can influence the mechanical and chemical properties of titanium alloy. After solving the yttrium contamination problem, applications to industrial manufacturing will be straightforward.

How much does the yttrium matter? How likely is there to be a solution to that problem?

Buried at the end of the article:

> A limitation of this work is that the resulting de-oxygenated titanium contains yttrium, up to 1% by mass; > After solving the yttrium contamination problem, applications to industrial manufacturing will be straightforward.

One wonders how much of a problem this is for most applications, and how easy it will be to solve...

Surely this is something that will go down in price as energy costs do, regardless of the yttrium approach, correct? With solar getting cheaper and fusion on the horizon, won’t that address the problem as well? I wonder if this intermediary step is necessary if so.

> fusion on the horizon

fusion is not on the horizon

Oh it is, in the same way mirages appear on the horizon.

In the same way the pot of gold is at the end of the rainbow. Close enough to see, never close enough to reach.

My 7 year old told me he found the pot of gold last year, so it seems to me that we should be more optimistic about fusion

How many times have you arrived at the horizon?

It is at sunrise and sunset.

Best moments to watch the fission.

And it's actually a good thing that it hasn't come any closer.

Maybe? If anyone has better knowledge on whether or not this is legitimate, that would be cool to know.

https://www.businessinsider.com/helion-energy-fusion-company...

Helion is legitimate and they have a very clever approach, but it definitely still isn't a sure bet that they will succeed.

It's 20 years away.

You should look again. There are a dozen different approaches that have a good chance of crossing the threshold to commercially viable fusion in the near term, and they are each very well funded.

It'll always be 20 years away until it's here. Will that be in 20 or 200 years, who knows.

please no more titantium phones / watches though. Stainless is a much harder much more appropriate material. Tired of scratches, but "O M G ITS TITANIUM"

I thought the deal with titanium was that it was lightweight and durable, not scratch proof.

Durable how? A wristwatch isn't experiencing much in the way of stress.

My take: We're talking a few grams difference on a phone/watch. If it were a laptop, it might actually make a difference, but they don't get beat around like a watch or phone does.

Titanium is basically as hard as al dente pasta, topping out around 40 HRC... which some composite plastics can approach. Meanwwhile even your crappy outdated stainless formulations from the 1940s can easily reach 60 HRC.

According to chatgpt, an apple watch weigh 61grams in hipster-loathing titanium. If you were to use stainless on that, it'd increase it by... 30grams. At it could be hardened to absurd levels (60+), to the point were scratching would only be possible by silica bearing materials like hard hard rock.

A critical step in the researchers' protocol is reacting molten titanium with yttrium metal and yttrium trifluoride or a similar substance...

A limitation of this work is that the resulting de-oxygenated titanium contains yttrium, up to 1% by mass; yttrium can influence the mechanical and chemical properties of titanium alloy. After solving the yttrium contamination problem, applications to industrial manufacturing will be straightforward.

Any thoughts how they'll do that?

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