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