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History of Titanium
From:Baoji Pro-Titanium Metals Co.Ltd | Hits:14090
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Titanium has been around since 1790 and gets it name from the Greek God ¡°Titan¡±, the God of enormous strength. Not until 1910, 120 years since the discovery of the ore in England, was there a process developed that allowed the metal to be extracted from the ore.
The individual responsible for this process was a gentleman by the name of M.A. Hunter. The basic process created by Mr. Hunter involved mixing TiO2 with coke and chlorine. When heat was applied to the TiO2 the resulting product was TiCl4. Then sodium was used to reduce the TiCl4 . At this point in time, the titanium produced by this method was used as an alloying agent in the production of steel.
TiO2 was a bi-product of the process developed by Hunter and it was determined that it had the characteristics necessary to make it a great white pigment. As a result it was used in paint specifically for this reason.
Although the Hunter process was a viable method to extract the metal from the ore, it proved not conducive to large scale manufacturing efforts. A gentleman by the name of Dr. Wilhelm Kroll is the man credited with creating a process that reduced titanium effectively on a large scale basis. The process used magnesium as the reducing agent, as opposed to the sodium previously used by Hunter. This process was named after its founder and is known today as the Kroll process.
Although the Kroll Process was a major improvement in the extraction process, it did leave a chloride residue and it also did not recover the unreacted magnesium metal. This contamination was addressed very successfully with the application of vacuum distillation. Currently, the Kroll Process, combined with Vacuum Distillation is the typical method of extracting the metal from the ore. |
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