The Most Fascinating Titanium Uses

General information about titanium

Titanium is known as a transition metal on the periodic table of elements denoted by the symbol Ti. It is a lightweight, silver-gray material with an atomic number of 22 and an atomic weight of 47.90. It has a density of 4510 kg/m ³, which is somewhere between the densities of aluminum and stainless steel. It has a melting point of roughly 3,032°F (1,667°C) and a boiling point of 5,948°F (3,287 C). It behaves chemically similar to zirconium and silicon. It has excellent corrosion resistance and high strength to weight ratio.

Let’s talk about the fascinating uses of titanium metal today

At Titanium Industries, we work with many manufacturers, engineers, and designers that use Titanium in a wide variety of products and projects.

If individual plates of the same weight were made from Titanium, Copper, and Stainless Steel, the Titanium Plate would be double the size of the copper, and 75% larger than the Stainless Steel. Conversely, you could buy half as much Titanium to do the same job as Copper, and slightly more than half as much to do the same job as Stainless Steel.

The equipment and capability in our warehouse give us the flexibility to meet a wide variety of customer needs – and so we get to see a huge range of these applications from simple weight reduction to advanced body implants.

Titanium products are “the new kids on the block” when considering the time frame of discovery and mass production of titanium. It’s been only a decade since the high prices in manufacturing, and especially processing and machining of titanium got low enough to allow the use of titanium outside the aerospace and military ultra-specialized and expensive niche.

Commercial titanium metal-based products form around 15% of the titanium market nowadays, and it is the fastest-growing market sector with approximately double the growth of the titanium market in general.

1. Titanium in the Aerospace market

The aircraft to use Titanium Alloys extensively in its structure and skin. The aerodynamic friction that resulted from the intense speeds of which the aircraft was capable created so much aerodynamic friction that if any other metal was used, it would simply melt out of the sky. In fact, it was so fast, that if anyone fired a surface to air missile at it – the standard evasive procedure was to simply accelerate and outrun it!

Today, about two-thirds of all Titanium metal produced is used in aircraft engines and frames. As an example, the A380 Airbus uses approximately 70 tons of Titanium for the aircraft structure and fittings.

2. One of the most bio-compatible metal -Titanium in medical

Another exclusive and less known titanium characteristic is osseointegration. Titanium is the only metal that is so well tolerated by the human system that the bone tissue actually grows around it. This makes titanium ideal for dental implants.

In fact, it is estimated that we ingest around 0.8mg of Titanium a day – most passes through us without being absorbed. Also, its density is very similar to human bone, which will readily adhere to it.

3. Everyday products- the direction fo SID

Surprisingly, of all the mined and synthetic Titanium minerals, approximately only 5% is used to produce Titanium metal. The remaining more than 90% is used to manufacture pure Titanium Dioxides – a pigment that enhances brightness and opacity in paints and inks, paper, and plastics, and even in food products and cosmetics.

Due to the fact that titanium bicycle is one of the most widespread titanium applications in the sports field, one can hardly summarize everything there is to say about it in just a webpage. This would be no more than an introduction, an attempt to give you a general idea about what you would expect when assessing a titanium bike.

The high strength to weight ratio of Titanium makes it ideal for use in a wide range of sporting equipment. The world’s lightest bicycle, which weighs only 6 lbs! But everyone knows that an average adult bike weighs 30 lbs.

We produce titanium lug bolts for racing cars, obviously, this also can help reduce the weight of the car.

Titanium Gr5 also be used in the body of Apple’s PowerBook line – helping achieve a lightweight frame.

Titanium is also naturally resistant to corrosion and erosion – making it a great choice for safety equipment. When the 6,000 bolts that secured the daring climbing track in Ton Sai first started to erode, they were replaced with Stainless Steel.

However, the Stainless Steel replacements only lasted 9 months, after which they had a corrosion problem that would break the bolt on a simple bodyweight charge. Metallurgists discovered that the only metal the climbers could trust with their lives was Titanium.

An average of 2,000 climbers use this track per week, and a group of keen climbers has started a charity to replace all the bolts with Titanium along the entire length of the route.

4. Titanium Art/Architecture

Titanium spontaneously forms a hard protective oxide film upon contact with any oxygen. It’s this film that gives the metal its trademark shine and shimmer, with variations in the film’s thickness affecting the color that the metal projects. It also has remarkable elasticity, making it the metal of choice for artistic and architectural structures. For instance, the 40 m (131 foot) memorial to Yuri Gagarin (the first man to travel in space) in Moscow, is made of Titanium for the metal’s attractive color and association with rocketry. The Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao is sheathed in Titanium panels. It can also be used to help structural repair of historic buildings. Titanium was used as a part of the 2008 structural repair and stabilization for the Leaning Tower of Pisa in Italy.

The artist who chose Titanium for the Olympic Torch Cauldron said he chose the metal for two reasons – its modern image of superior technology and its beautiful colors when heat treated.

Future of Titanium

Future advances in titanium manufacture are likely to be found in the area of improved ingot production, the development of new alloys, the reduction in production costs, and the application to new industries. Currently, there is a need for larger ingots than can be produced by the available furnaces. Research is ongoing to develop larger furnaces that can meet these needs. Work is also being done on finding the optimal composition of various titanium alloys. Ultimately, researchers hope that specialized materials with controlled microstructures will be readily produced. Finally, researchers have been investigating different methods for titanium purification. Recently, scientists at Cambridge University announced a method for producing pure titanium directly from titanium dioxide. This could substantially reduce production costs and increase availability.