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.<p>The reason? Titanium sucks to work with.<p>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.<p>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...
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.<p>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.
There’s a significant history of government effort to improve working with titanium. Construction physics wrote a nice review [0].<p>The current level of workability and cost and alloying is <i>after</i> 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.<p>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.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.construction-physics.com/p/the-story-of-titanium" rel="nofollow">https://www.construction-physics.com/p/the-story-of-titanium</a>
Magnesium is similar.<p>I used to have a magnesium campfire starter. It was a little ingot of magnesium, with a long flint, embedded along one side.<p>You used your knife to shave some magnesium, then the flint, to set it ablaze.<p>Worked a treat.
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.<p>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).
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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
> 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.<p>My understanding is that rust fails to protect iron the same way. Is that right? If so, why the difference?
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.<p>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.
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.
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.<p>This depends on the alloy involved as well. In general though rust is not a good iron protection.
Metallic titanium is already cheaper than copper, and the price ratio between copper and titanium will only increase.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.
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.
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.<p>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).
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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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).
It isn't toxic, and that's an advantage that overrides any extra costs.
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.<p>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.<p>and if youre still having problems, EDM will absolutely slice through it like butter.<p>nobody is working endmills or lathes with dry Ti and toolsteel in 2025. robots drown the piece in coolant and pick the right tools.
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.
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.<p>What he told me is titanium is not expensive, but the problem is with the tooling. Expensive, hard to work with and energy intensive .
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.<p>it is a lot titanium outthere in retail.
> 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.<p>The safety and security implementation, including assorted regulations, certificates, processes, regulators and the like, is as neccessary as it's... vexing. :)
Does this mean I won't get a cheap titanium suit of armour? Could me a game changer for HEMA.
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.<p>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.
If you're going to use modern tech, why not just go all the way and do fiberglass with thin steel faces or something like that?
Yep, nope.<p>BTW - might HEMA have any safety regs, for equipment that <i>could</i> become a Class D fire? There might be hazmat issues transporting such armour by air.
an apple titanium powerbook was pretty cool though<p>EDIT:
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBook_G4#Titanium_(2001-2002)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBook_G4#Titanium_(2001-20...</a>
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This is very cool indeed, but I laughed when I got to the conclusion:<p>> 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…<p>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.<p>As always, I hope someone figures out the rest of the problem space. As-is, this looks like trading one problem for another.
Yttrium is a more benign contaminant.<p>Very small amounts of oxygen in titanium are enough to make it too hard and too fragile for most applications.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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).
> this looks like trading one problem for another.<p>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).<p>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.<p>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!'
> Every choice trades one problem for another.<p>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.<p>Which is to say, makes it anything but ultra pure. :)<p>> It could be that methods for removing yttrium are already mature and only need to be applied to this case.<p>Sorry but no. That’s specially a problem they highlighted as needing a solution.
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<p>That said, I welcome others to look into substituting, eg, aluminum for yttrium in these methods (since titalum is already a thing)
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.<p>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.<p>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.
Delving into the paper: Al has defo been used for deoxidizing Ti but they claim it's "inadequate"<p>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<p>(For the sake of more collaborative conversations on HN, not just dissfests :)
Where would yttrium be harmful, if you happen to know?
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Yttrium may diminish somewhat the chemical resistance of titanium for such applications, but the resistance might still be adequate for many of these applications.
> Sorry but no. That’s specially a problem they highlighted as needing a solution.<p>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.
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?<p>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)?<p>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.
Grade 2 Sponge Titanium (USD/mt) = $6,087.03<p>Yttrium: 28.9 USD/kg is 2890 USD/mt<p>So the 1% Yttrium might be financially reasonable (assuming extra demand can be met). Prices from metal.com
I think you made a mistake converting units, 28.9 USD/kg = $28900 per ton.
Sounds like a ‘find a useful titanium/??/yttrium alloy’ situation.<p>I’m shocked that yttrium is dearer than smelted titanium.
what's mt?
"can influence" means either that science doesn't know yet how yttrium influences the alloy properties, or that the journalist didn't ask.
Isn't yttrium sometimes added to increase the strength of titanium, anyway?
Titanium dioxide is about 40% oxygen by mass. Converting that to 1% of something else seems like it's doing something.
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.
> <i>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.</i><p>"Direct production of low-oxygen-concentration titanium from molten titanium" (2024)
<a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-49085-4" rel="nofollow">https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-49085-4</a>
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."
Looks like they applied for a patent here: <a href="https://patentscope.wipo.int/search/en/detail.jsf?docId=WO2025017986" rel="nofollow">https://patentscope.wipo.int/search/en/detail.jsf?docId=WO20...</a>
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......
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.<p>Works great on tea, plain H20 and anything I've put in it. Non reactive as far as I can tell and rugged too.
> Works great on tea<p>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.<p>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.
Oolong, loongching, typical blacks, a red I can't pronounce (tsin hong?), herbals...<p>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.<p>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.<p>However, imposter cups and imitations, which brands I won't name, I'd hesitate to use as bed pans.<p>Edit: it's worth adding that I almost never scrub it or use soap. The interior is stained, presumably with tannins
If you want something way bigger but still ultralight and single-walled, Vargo Bot HD or Vargo BOT XL are like a larger version with a screw top threaded titanium lid (uses a silicone o-ring to seal).
>> 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.<p>How much does the yttrium matter? How likely is there to be a solution to <i>that</i> problem?
Buried at the end of the article:<p>> 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.<p>One wonders how much of a problem this is for most applications, and how easy it will be to solve...
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.
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"
<i>A critical step in the researchers' protocol is reacting molten titanium with yttrium metal and yttrium trifluoride or a similar substance...<p>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.</i><p>Any thoughts how they'll do that?