8 ms·

Cheap yet ultrapure titanium might enable widespread use in industry (2024)

125 points by westurner 1y ago

westurner 1y 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) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-49085-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-49085-4
- Animats 1y 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?
  - more_corn 1y 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 1y 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
  - westurner 1y 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 1y 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.
      - mmooss 1y ago
        > with human review What human?
      - meepmorp 1y 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.
        westurner 1y ago
        Do you have a factual dispute with what I posted? Are any of those alternatives hallucinations, in your opinion? I feel uncompleted to further assist these.
  - digdugdirk 1y 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 1y 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-raptor-3-engine-and-specifications.html https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2024/08/spacex-reveals-raptor-...
jjcm 1y 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 1y ago
  > fusion on the horizon fusion is not on the horizon
  - _aavaa_ 1y ago
    Oh it is, in the same way mirages appear on the horizon.
    - more_corn 1y 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 1y 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
  - rjsw 1y ago
    How many times have you arrived at the horizon?
  - Electricniko 1y ago
    It is at sunrise and sunset.
    - guide42 1y ago
      Best moments to watch the fission.
foota 1y ago
Looks like they applied for a patent here: https://patentscope.wipo.int/search/en/detail.jsf?docId=WO2025017986 https://patentscope.wipo.int/search/en/detail.jsf?docId=WO20...
Aurornis 1y 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.
- foota 1y 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 1y 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?
    - freeone3000 1y ago
      …Very hard. It’s titanium. Every work process has to be done with special carbide bits, at half speed, underwater.
      - 1y ago
LasEspuelas 1y 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."
duffpkg 1y 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 1y ago
  Most of what they figured out about working with it is still very close to the best we can even unreasonably manage
zafka 1y 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......
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
digdugdirk 1y 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...
- mjb 1y 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.
  - adastra22 1y 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 1y 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.
eth0up 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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.
exabrial 1y 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 1y ago
  I thought the deal with titanium was that it was lightweight and durable, not scratch proof.
  - thaumasiotes 1y ago
    Durable how? A wristwatch isn't experiencing much in the way of stress.
  - exabrial 1y 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.
neutrinobro 1y 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...
phkahler 1y 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?
rkagerer 1y ago
A critical step in the researchers' protocol is reacting molten titanium with yttrium metal and yttrium trifluoride or a similar substance... 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. Any thoughts how they'll do that?

125 points by westurner 1y 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) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-49085-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-49085-4

Animats 1y 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?
- more_corn 1y 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 1y 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
- westurner 1y 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 1y 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.
    - mmooss 1y ago
      > with human review What human?
    - meepmorp 1y 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.
      - westurner 1y ago
        Do you have a factual dispute with what I posted? Are any of those alternatives hallucinations, in your opinion? I feel uncompleted to further assist these.
- digdugdirk 1y 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 1y 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-raptor-3-engine-and-specifications.html https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2024/08/spacex-reveals-raptor-...

jjcm 1y 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 1y ago
> fusion on the horizon fusion is not on the horizon
- _aavaa_ 1y ago
  Oh it is, in the same way mirages appear on the horizon.
  - more_corn 1y 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 1y 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
- rjsw 1y ago
  How many times have you arrived at the horizon?
- Electricniko 1y ago
  It is at sunrise and sunset.
  - guide42 1y ago
    Best moments to watch the fission.

foota 1y ago

Looks like they applied for a patent here: https://patentscope.wipo.int/search/en/detail.jsf?docId=WO2025017986 https://patentscope.wipo.int/search/en/detail.jsf?docId=WO20...

Aurornis 1y 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.

foota 1y 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 1y 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?
  - freeone3000 1y ago
    …Very hard. It’s titanium. Every work process has to be done with special carbide bits, at half speed, underwater.
    - 1y ago

LasEspuelas 1y 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."

duffpkg 1y 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 1y ago
Most of what they figured out about working with it is still very close to the best we can even unreasonably manage

zafka 1y 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......

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

digdugdirk 1y 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...

mjb 1y 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.
- adastra22 1y 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 1y 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.

eth0up 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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.

exabrial 1y 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 1y ago
I thought the deal with titanium was that it was lightweight and durable, not scratch proof.
- thaumasiotes 1y ago
  Durable how? A wristwatch isn't experiencing much in the way of stress.
- exabrial 1y 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.

neutrinobro 1y 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...

phkahler 1y 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?

rkagerer 1y ago

A critical step in the researchers' protocol is reacting molten titanium with yttrium metal and yttrium trifluoride or a similar substance... 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. Any thoughts how they'll do that?