#Titanium #pricing is 48.50 renminbi per kilogram, which is almost US$7. #materials #finance
on 02026-06-01#Titanium symposium #toread from 01966, with notes about what to avoid (chlorinated cutting fluids that cause chloride stress corrosion) and its #history.
on 02025-12-12by Aravindh Rajan and Ian McKay at #Orca: #titanium #materials #pricing is 60× the cost of the ore (a cheap white pigment and filler for plastics) plus the change in enthalpy, a very high multiple, so this post explores where the extra cost comes from. Basically refining titanium is a five-step process, the first step being mining, and the cost doubles at each step. After three steps you have titanium sponge, which is hard to turn into the desired fully dense metal, which in turn is hard to machine, quadrupling the cost of final parts. Could you maybe just use the sponge, maybe as the filling/web in sandwich panels? Also ECM seems promising as a way to reduce the cost of the last step, machining. Lists past failed attempts to bring the cost down, including the FFC Cambridge process but also five more recent proposed cheaper processes. There’s an astonishing graph finding roughly 100× lower fatigue life for HIPped (hot isostatic pressed) titanium parts than for wrought parts. “Molten titanium will react with all metal oxides except yttria, zirconia, and calcium oxide. Due to calcium’s volatility at titanium’s melting point, titanium can also react with calcium oxide to form calcium vapor, if there is no excess of the latter.”
on 02025-12-12#video on #manufacturing #titanium features on glass with #photolithography with 20μm resolution with vacuum coating by magnetron argon sputtering. He tried using a photographic enlarger in reverse without success. His setup is about 2 meters tall and made from 8020 aluminum extrusions, with a Minolta camera zoom lens (35–70mm, DSLR?) focusing onto the photoresist on his microscope slide, after a Fresnel-lens illumination stage similar to an overhead projector (and possibly actually taken from one), converging the light onto the camera lens. He’s using a 395nm LED behind two diffusers from LCD monitors for the light source, which make the light more homogeneous on the focal plane than just focusing from the LED. He’s using a transparency film intended for screen printing to get more opaque masks, laser-printable maybe, sandwiched between two sheets of glass to keep it flat. Previously he was using this blue dry film photoresist, but couldn’t get consistent results. He tried spin-coating Mungolux R1000 liquid photoresist. Finally he used a Merck MicroChemicals AZ LNR-003 positive photoresist designed for lift-off techniques, spending US$170 on a 100mℓ bottle. He 3-D printed his spin coater, built around a drone motor. Because the slide is transparent he can put a USB microscope behind it to focus the camera lens. The undeveloped photoresist is washed off with lye and the developed photoresist lifts off the titanium with acetone. His sponsor PCBWay manufactured the magnetron he designed for sputtering. His Minolta setup gives him 14× reduction, which is how he gets to 20μm.
on 02024-08-01i.materialise is a British #3D printing company that offers, among other things, direct metal laser sintering of #titanium, with 250μm feature size.
on 02015-11-11#Titanium #pricing in the US has gone from US$9.62/kg in 2010 to US$11.20/kg in 2014. Nearby pages use dollars per pound, but the prices per kg show a sharp reduction from its peak of US$17.28 in 2005, but it had a low of US$6.50 in 2003, US$9.70 in 1995, and US$8.26 in 1992–3. This means that the FFC Cambridge Process is not in production yet.
on 02015-08-28