Titanium takes off
17 Jan 2001
A new process to refine metallic titanium by electrochemical methods could bring the space-age metal down to earth.
British Titanium, a company formed to commercialise the process, is aiming to raise £13.6million on the stock market to fund the construction of a pilot plant. If successful, the company claims that the process could cut the cost of titanium to $2000-4000 per tonne - around the same price as stainless steel. Currently, titanium costs around $16 000 per tonne.
The process was developed by Derek Fray, a materials scientist at Cambridge University, and has been tested at small scales at the UK government's Defence Evaluation and Research Agency. Rather than electrolysing a molten salt of titanium, this method uses readily available solid titanium dioxide as a starting material, and works by stripping away the oxygen.
Fray's technique starts by moulding the TiO2 into the anode for an electrolytic cell. Although usually this material is an insulator, it becomes a conductor as soon as a minute amount of oxygen is removed. The anode is simply transformed from oxide to metal - the titanium is never in an ionised or a liquid state. Moreover, the anode can be moulded into the form required and reduced to the metal without further machining.
