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Process could bring price down to earth

https://www.chemnet.com   Jul 19,2010
Wath-upon-Dearne, once a coal mining village on the outskirts of Rotherham in South Yorkshire, is not normally regarded as a centre for high technology.

But in recent months a stream of top company executives has been turning up at an unassuming industrial building in the village to discuss a new development that could be hugely significant to a range of global manufacturing sectors.

Whetting their appetite has been the potential for cutting significantly the cost of making titanium, a metal that has been made since the 1930s but through a process that is highly energy intensive and therefore hugely expensive.

Last year only about 100,000 tonnes of titanium was made and consumed worldwide as against 40m tonnes of aluminium and 1.2bn tonnes of steel.

While titanium crops up in high-tech sectors such as aerospace and orthopaedic implants, it could be used in a far wider range of sectors, from toys to kitchen appliances, if the price of the material could be brought down.

The current method of refining titanium centres on the Kroll process, devised in 1932 by William Kroll. It uses a lot of energy, is potentially dangerous and produces only small quantities of titanium at a time. It involves adding chlorine to mineral rock, followed by a high-temperature reaction with magnesium or sodium.

Like the Kroll process, the Metalysis technique starts with mineral rock based on titanium dioxide, which is a common natural material. However, it dispenses with the difficulties of adding chlorine to this material and replaces this with an electrolysis-based technique centred on passing electric current through a bath of calcium chloride with a solid plug of titanium dioxide acting as the so-called anode in the process.

What the company has achieved so far has impressed a number of onlookers. Alf Bjørseth, founder and board member of Norsk Titanium, a Norwegian titanium maker which has discussed collaboration with Metalysis, said: “Everyone knows there’s a huge need to improve on the Kroll process. Their [Metalysis’s] ideas seem to me to have a huge amount of potential.”

Metalysis is now discussing a much bigger commercial-size plant that could be built in three years at a cost of £70m ($107m), possibly in the Sheffield area.

Mark Bertolini, chief executive of Metalysis, said: “We are talking to a number of potential collaborators [about a commercial scale plant]. It’s possible we could do this in a joint venture or some other kind of partnership with a bigger industrial player. If this went ahead it could make a big contribution to helping an industrial renaissance in this part of the UK.”
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