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Cheap yet ultrapure titanium might enable widespread use in industry (2024)
phkahler wrote 23 hours 48 min ago:
>> 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?
neutrinobro wrote 23 hours 49 min ago:
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...
exabrial wrote 1 day ago:
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"
mock-possum wrote 1 day ago:
I thought the deal with titanium was that it was lightweight and
durable, not scratch proof.
exabrial wrote 12 hours 2 min ago:
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even your crappy outdated stainless formulations from the 1940s can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.
thaumasiotes wrote 23 hours 41 min ago:
Durable how? A wristwatch isn't experiencing much in the way of
stress.
eth0up wrote 1 day ago:
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.
amluto wrote 1 day ago:
> 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.
eth0up wrote 23 hours 50 min ago:
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
amluto wrote 22 hours 11 min ago:
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.
eth0up wrote 21 hours 51 min ago:
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.
amluto wrote 21 hours 9 min ago:
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.
eth0up wrote 11 hours 51 min ago:
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.
digdugdirk wrote 1 day ago:
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...
tecleandor wrote 4 hours 2 min ago:
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 .
m463 wrote 19 hours 55 min ago:
an apple titanium powerbook was pretty cool though
EDIT:
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBook_G4#Titanium_(2001-20...
nimbius wrote 1 day ago:
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.
jajko wrote 21 hours 7 min ago:
Still sounds like tons of reasons to have high final cost, compared
to cheaper metals.
adrian_b wrote 19 hours 2 min ago:
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.
gadders wrote 1 day ago:
Does this mean I won't get a cheap titanium suit of armour? Could me
a game changer for HEMA.
bell-cot wrote 23 hours 59 min ago:
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.
bluGill wrote 1 day ago:
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.
gadders wrote 23 hours 55 min ago:
I often wonder how much we could improve on historic items like
suits of armour using modern materials and manufacturing.
bluGill wrote 23 hours 34 min ago:
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.
gadders wrote 22 hours 41 min ago:
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.
dlahoda wrote 1 day ago:
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.
AngryData wrote 1 day ago:
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.
ekaryotic wrote 1 day ago:
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.
adrian_b wrote 19 hours 31 min ago:
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).
bluGill wrote 1 day ago:
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).
adrian_b wrote 19 hours 26 min ago:
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.
bluGill wrote 1 hour 8 min ago:
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.
Nopoint2 wrote 1 day ago:
It isn't toxic, and that's an advantage that overrides any extra
costs.
arethuza wrote 1 day ago:
It's also highly biocompatible so good for things like bone
implants.
adrian_b wrote 1 day ago:
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.
thaumasiotes wrote 23 hours 50 min ago:
> and its high reactivity with the atmosphere when hot
Isn't that a problem for everything? That's the nature of heat.
adrian_b wrote 19 hours 45 min ago:
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.
SubjectToChange wrote 21 hours 26 min ago:
Molten iron can be poured in open air. Doing that with titanium
will yield a distinctly different results.
kergonath wrote 23 hours 4 min ago:
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.
owenversteeg wrote 1 day ago:
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.
spankibalt wrote 1 day ago:
> 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. :)
mjb wrote 1 day ago:
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.
nerdsniper wrote 22 hours 35 min ago:
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).
avs733 wrote 1 day ago:
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]
[1]: https://www.construction-physics.com/p/the-story-of-titani...
ChrisMarshallNY wrote 1 day ago:
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.
adastra22 wrote 1 day ago:
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.
adrian_b wrote 1 day ago:
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.
thaumasiotes wrote 23 hours 53 min ago:
> 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?
kergonath wrote 23 hours 10 min ago:
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.
mercurywells wrote 23 hours 16 min ago:
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.
bluGill wrote 23 hours 22 min ago:
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.
zafka wrote 1 day ago:
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......
duffpkg wrote 1 day ago:
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.
monster_truck wrote 1 day ago:
Most of what they figured out about working with it is still very
close to the best we can even unreasonably manage
LasEspuelas wrote 1 day ago:
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."
Aurornis wrote 1 day ago:
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.
adrian_b wrote 1 day ago:
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).
maxerickson wrote 1 day ago:
Titanium dioxide is about 40% oxygen by mass. Converting that to 1%
of something else seems like it's doing something.
shakna wrote 1 day ago:
Isn't yttrium sometimes added to increase the strength of titanium,
anyway?
mmooss wrote 1 day ago:
> 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!'
Aurornis wrote 1 day ago:
> 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.
mmooss wrote 1 day ago:
> 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.
gsf_emergency wrote 1 day ago:
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)
adrian_b wrote 18 hours 52 min ago:
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.
gsf_emergency wrote 9 hours 56 min ago:
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 :)
mmooss wrote 16 hours 12 min ago:
Where would yttrium be harmful, if you happen to know?
adrian_b wrote 6 hours 55 min ago:
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.
robocat wrote 1 day ago:
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
NooneAtAll3 wrote 1 day ago:
what's mt?
cjbgkagh wrote 1 day ago:
It means metric ton, different to US and GB imperial tons.
Const-me wrote 1 day ago:
I think you made a mistake converting units, 28.9 USD/kg = $28900
per ton.
two_handfuls wrote 1 day ago:
Thank you for the correction and also for helping me realize they
meant "metric ton" (t).
hinkley wrote 1 day ago:
Sounds like a ‘find a useful titanium/??/yttrium alloy’
situation.
I’m shocked that yttrium is dearer than smelted titanium.
robocat wrote 1 day ago:
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...
hinkley wrote 22 hours 39 min ago:
Ah, that was a typo. Not dearer.
robocat wrote 1 day ago:
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.
BurningFrog wrote 1 day ago:
"can influence" means either that science doesn't know yet how
yttrium influences the alloy properties, or that the journalist
didn't ask.
hinkley wrote 1 day ago:
Or the scientist read the room and decided being vague was the best
option.
foota wrote 1 day ago:
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.
LasEspuelas wrote 1 day ago:
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?
foota wrote 1 day ago:
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.
freeone3000 wrote 1 day ago:
…Very hard. It’s titanium. Every work process has to be done
with special carbide bits, at half speed, underwater.
hinkley wrote 1 day ago:
Tungsten carbide isn’t it?
foota wrote 1 day ago:
Looks like they applied for a patent here:
[1]: https://patentscope.wipo.int/search/en/detail.jsf?docId=WO2025...
jjcm wrote 1 day ago:
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.
fnord77 wrote 1 day ago:
> fusion on the horizon
fusion is not on the horizon
simsla wrote 1 day ago:
It'll always be 20 years away until it's here. Will that be in 20
or 200 years, who knows.
adastra22 wrote 1 day ago:
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.
dehrmann wrote 1 day ago:
It's 20 years away.
BirAdam wrote 1 day ago:
Maybe? If anyone has better knowledge on whether or not this is
legitimate, that would be cool to know.
[1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/helion-energy-fusion-compa...
ted_dunning wrote 1 day ago:
Helion is legitimate and they have a very clever approach, but it
definitely still isn't a sure bet that they will succeed.
Electricniko wrote 1 day ago:
It is at sunrise and sunset.
jonasenordin wrote 1 day ago:
And it's actually a good thing that it hasn't come any closer.
guide42 wrote 1 day ago:
Best moments to watch the fission.
rjsw wrote 1 day ago:
How many times have you arrived at the horizon?
_aavaa_ wrote 1 day ago:
Oh it is, in the same way mirages appear on the horizon.
more_corn wrote 1 day ago:
In the same way the pot of gold is at the end of the rainbow.
Close enough to see, never close enough to reach.
steve_adams_86 wrote 1 day ago:
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
westurner wrote 5 days ago:
> 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)
[1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-49085-4
Animats wrote 1 day ago:
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?
digdugdirk wrote 1 day ago:
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.)
Animats wrote 15 hours 15 min ago:
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-rap...
westurner wrote 1 day ago:
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, …
westurner wrote 1 day ago:
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.
meepmorp wrote 1 day ago:
> 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.
mmooss wrote 1 day ago:
> with human review
What human?
more_corn wrote 1 day ago:
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…
metalman wrote 1 day ago:
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
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