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Major Melt—Crucible Systems
Published in Nagaiyar Krishnamurthy, Metal–Crucible Interactions, 2023
The industrial importance and the quantity of research effort that titanium has attracted in the past 80 years among the less common metals is comparable to those of iron and steel among the common metals. Titanium is a very abundant element in the earth's crust, and its major ores are easily accessible in every part of the world. The question of titanium metal production in sufficient purity and decent quantities was presented with a workable solution when William Justin Kroll developed a magnesium reduction process for titanium tetrachloride, the ‘Kroll process', in the 1940s (Kroll 1940, 1959). Certain titanium alloys have outstanding combinations of properties that make them highly attractive for applications as structural materials in the aerospace and automotive industries, for chemical, petrochemical and marine applications, and in the manufacture of biomedical components and surgical instruments. Some other alloys of titanium have a combination of properties – shape memory and hydrogen storage – that make them very useful as functional materials for special applications in power generation, energy storage, robotics, biomedical and telecommunications, among others.
Effects of powder material and process parameters on the roll compaction, sintering and cold rolling of titanium sponge
Published in Powder Metallurgy, 2019
Julian O’Flynn, Stephen F. Corbin
Titanium powders from two suppliers were used for this study: Alfa Aesar and ADMA Products, Inc. (referred to here as ‘Alfa’ and ‘ADMA’ powders, respectively). Details of the powder sizes are shown in Table 1. The Alfa material was produced by the Hunter process (sodium reduction of titanium tetrachloride) and received as a very coarse powder, specified by the supplier as ‘3 mm and under’. This powder was then sieved in-house using a sieve shaker to four additional, smaller sizes as shown in the table. The ADMA powder was produced by the Kroll process (magnesium reduction of titanium tetrachloride) and was received pre-sieved by the supplier to the five different mesh sizes shown in the table. The four larger ADMA sizes were sieved from the same lot, while the finest size came from a different lot. Unlike the Alfa powders, all the ADMA powders also had a specified lower mesh size limit of 45 μm. The ADMA powders were subjected to an in-house powder size analysis by laser diffraction and the resulting d10, d50 and d90 values are included in Table 1. The as-received Alfa powder (3 mm) was too large for the laser diffraction system, so powder size was determined by sieve analysis (results shown in brackets in Table 1). Note that the sieve analysis tends to result in smaller diameter measurements compared to laser diffraction due to the non-spherical, elongated shape of the particles. Throughout this paper, the different powders will be referred to by their maximum mesh size in mm.
Selective laser melting raw material commoditization: impact on comparative competitiveness of additive manufacturing
Published in International Journal of Production Research, 2018
Siavash H. Khajavi, Gege Deng, Jan Holmström, Pasi Puukko, Jouni Partanen
As mentioned, the FFC Cambridge extraction process can reduce the cost of extracting high-purity titanium powder by 75% compared to the Kroll process. Because this study assumed the cost of Kroll Ti6Al4V-ingot and Ti6Al4V-bar to be 32€/kg, the price of Ti6Al4V-powder extracted by novel extraction process is determined to be 8€/kg (where . From here on, the research refers to the cheaper titanium extracted by novel extraction process as ‘Meta titanium’ or ‘Meta Ti6Al4V’. The total cost per LPB and ELB under Scenario Meta-AM and Scenario Kroll-Conv is presented in Table 2; cost estimation and related calculations are presented in Appendices 1, 4, 5 and 8. When the production volume is at 1000 parts, the price of LPB by AM is more expensive than the cost of each blade being manufactured by investment casting. The reason for this is because the economy of scale of investment casting results in lower per-part production costs as output increases. The cost of investment casting becomes nearly half of the AM cost when the volume increases to 10,000 blades. However, the SLM AM process is always more cost effective than CNC machining at different production volumes.
From titanium ore extraction and processing to its applications in the transportation industry — an overview
Published in CIM Journal, 2023
C. Siemers, F. Haase, L. Klinge
Ti metal is mainly produced by the Kroll process, which reduces titanium tetrachloride (TiCl4) with magnesium. In Ti ore beneficiation, Fe is first separated from ilmenite during a smelting operation to produce a TiO2-rich slag, which is then transformed to TiCl4 by chlorination (Figure 3). TiCl4 is then reduced to pure Ti by liquid magnesium reacting to magnesium chloride (mainly MgCl2) forming a Ti cake. Finally, a Ti sponge is obtained by vacuum distillation to remove the remaining MgCl2 and other by-products. The conversion of Ti ore into metallic Ti is energy intensive (Sibum et al., 2017).