Titanium Research Paper

862 Words4 Pages
Production and Manufacturing Even though titanium is of the most frequent and familiar elements on earth, the production of the metal is ultimately sensitive to impurity, caused specifically by oxygen. Therefore, the high cost of titanium takes into consideration the extreme sensitivity. Titanium is mainly found in the two minerals, ilmenite and rutile. These minerals are detached from waste material in a wet spiral concentrator by gravity separation. The concentrates resulted from this process are then detached by allowing them to pass through several magnetic, electrostatic, and gravity equipment. Titanium is ultimately difficult to extract from its ores. It took the scientists several years to come up with an efficient extraction process.…show more content…
These impurities include vanadium, arsenic, zirconium, iron, silicon, and magnesium. Therefore, impure titanium tetrachloride is then cleaned of all these impurities for the purpose of gaining a pure titanium tetrachloride. The cleaning process is initiated by allowing the former mixture to settle, where the undissolved particles are removed as dirt or mud. Afterwards, the liquid that contains several chlorides is passed through a distillation column and is chemically treated with hydrogen sulfide or mineral oil to eliminate vanadium oxychloride, which is a chloride that boils at the same temperature as titanium tetrachloride. Finally, it is redistilled again to further purify the titanium tetrachloride produced. This process generates titanium tetrachloride with a purity percentage exceeding…show more content…
At this point, the sponge contains residual magnesium and magnesium chloride. Thus, the sponge is crushed and treated with hydrochloric acid and water in order to eliminate excess magnesium and magnesium chloride. Another method for removing the residues is the high temperature vacuum distillation. Although the hunter process is similar to the Kroll process, the hunter process is more expensive and it is only used for the production of small amounts of high purity powder. The hunter process follows the same steps as the Kroll process except for the fact that sodium is added to the vessel and therefore, NaCl is the salt that is entrapped in the pores of the sponge formed. The chemical equation for the hunter process is as

More about Titanium Research Paper

Open Document