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...
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.
There’s a significant history of government effort to improve working with titanium. Construction physics wrote a nice review [0].
The current level of workability and cost and alloying is after that chicken and egg. Titanium is expensive because it is hard to manufacture, not just hard to work with, which limits demand. Titanium, to what we now know, is what it is. It’s the nature of the material not a lack of investment.
More realistically, the ROI isn’t there for most applications. Good aluminum is pretty darn good, massively easier to work, cheaper, etc. newer super steels have even made serious inroads on titanium parts because of workability and toughness.
Titanium - Chlorine fires are even more magnificent than titanium-oxygen fires. Wet chlorine (>150ppm water) is too corrosive for ferrous metals and titanium is often used for pipes carrying wet chlorine.
If something happens that ignites one of these pipelines there’s absolutely no way to put it out - it has the fuel (titanium) and oxidizer (chlorine) and burns mega-hot until one of them is fully consumed along the entire length of the pipeline. The pipelines can sometimes be shockingly long (1 mile-ish).
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.
Metallic titanium is already cheaper than copper, and the price ratio between copper and titanium will only increase.
However, as you say, the processing costs from the raw metal to a finite product are much higher for titanium than for most cheap metals, mostly because of its low thermal conductivity (which makes titanium locally hot during processing) and its high reactivity with the atmosphere when hot, which is why the products made of titanium are expensive.
It is unlikely that titanium will ever replace stainless steel in most of its applications, but wherever the lower density of titanium or its better resistance against certain chemicals give great enough advantages, I hope to see more titanium objects.
I certainly like the titanium frame of my reading glasses, which is extremely thin and lightweight, almost invisible, while being much stronger and longer lived than a plastic frame would be.
I could see cheaper titanium increasing its usage a good bit, only because we already avoid needing it whenever possible already. But overall I agree with you, titanium is significantly lighter than steel, but it isn't meaningfully stronger outside of special use cases, so the extra cost of manufacturing brings little to no value to 95% of steel usecases. Steel is just so easy to work with these days. And if something titanium breaks, its a full replacement of that cast or machined piece because you can't just weld it up with a simple portable welder, while steel can be repaired and modified near anywhere with dozens of relatively cheap and easy to use tools.
steel is great except for how easily it rusts. there are regions on the planet where a car shell is rotted out in 10 years. if a shell could be made from titanium you would have a long life vehicle, with environmental and economic savings.
maybe like 40 years ago? ive never understood where this comes from...its sort of the same argument machinists in the seventies had when automotive companies were building components with 15% nickel hardening out of dedicated normalizing and heat treat furnaces. tool steel life died a bit, but it wasnt the end of the world.
not anymore really. Kennametal and Sandvik all make insert tooling that will easily cut through Ti. Your multi-axis mills and CNC's will even track the tool wear for you and report when to replace. Titanium is no worse or better in your Haas than any other material in 2025.
and if youre still having problems, EDM will absolutely slice through it like butter.
nobody is working endmills or lathes with dry Ti and toolsteel in 2025. robots drown the piece in coolant and pick the right tools.
I agree with your comment in general, and that it is dangerous and abrasive and generally sucks to machine, but there are ways to get around that. For example you can make a lot of parts by stamping/forming/laser cutting fairly inexpensively. Sure, you'll still deal with titanium's quirks, but it's not a severe issue. For those parts the cost of the titanium is still typically the largest individual cost.
I remember talking to a guy I shared an office with like 10 or 15 years ago. He did 3D modeling for jewelry and dentists (as separate gigs, not jewelry on teeth ;) ) and he had access to 3D print titanium with a laser sintering device in the dentist practice.
What he told me is titanium is not expensive, but the problem is with the tooling. Expensive, hard to work with and energy intensive .
Yeah I make jewelry and have made some titanium chains by hand. Absolutely brutal to work with. And don't mess up! You need argon atmosphere to weld/solder it.
It was cheaper than I thought to grab a chunk of 99.9 pure from McMaster but dang it's tough stuff. Tools hate it. It's gummy.
Upshot is it can be anodized at home with stuff almost anyone has.
> 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.
The safety and security implementation, including assorted regulations, certificates, processes, regulators and the like, is as neccessary as it's... vexing. :)
You can get one if you are willing to pay for it. It means there is no reason to think that suit of armour will ever be cheap, and this advance while potentially lowering the costs won't lower it enough.
Then again iron suits of armour are not cheap (though cheaper than titanium), and are mostly useless in the real world - but people have them. If you have the money I won't object you to getting one.
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.
Very small amounts of oxygen in titanium are enough to make it too hard and too fragile for most applications.
Adding less harmful impurities to bind the more harmful impurities that cannot be otherwise removed (a.k.a. gettering) has always been a major purification technique, both in metallurgy and in semiconductor technology.
Steel is purified in the same way from the more harmful impurities, by adding other impurities like calcium, silicon or manganese or rare-earth metals.
In some cases, the compounds that result from adding impurities may be removed later, e.g. like slag floating on molten steel, but in other cases they may remain in the metal or semiconductor that is the desired end product.
It remains to be seen whether the extra yttrium and yttrium oxide that remain in titanium are harmful enough to make it worth to attempt to remove them somehow. In some cases they may even have beneficial properties, though e.g. for dental implants I would want commercially pure titanium that does not have any other metallic impurities like yttrium (commercially pure titanium includes small amounts of oxygen and of iron, both of which have no harmful effects in living tissues).
> this looks like trading one problem for another.
Every choice trades one problem for another. At a minimum, the new problem is the cost in resources - time, money, personal energy (and in business, usually reputation risk and political capital) - but usually the cost is much more than that, especially when looking at alternative technical solutions. In advice to clients I always present the options as the minimum trade-off (it's my job to minimize it).
More generally, the question is, which scenario of outcomes do you want? It could be the scenario with 1% yttrium is far better than the one with oxygen, or that the ytrrium scenario has a very different set of costs and benefits which make it valuable for certain needs that the oxygen scenario doesn't fulfill. It could be that methods for removing yttrium are already mature and only need to be applied to this case.
But especially in this case, the report is about research & development. If there were no more problems to solve then it wouldn't be R&D. It's really self-defeating to criticize progress in R&D because some problems remain. 'We scored a goal, but that's just trading one problem for another - the other team has the ball!'
The problem in this case is that the headline claimed “ultra pure titanium” and the closing paragraph had a tiny oh-by-the-way mention that the process contaminates the titanium with yttrium.
Which is to say, makes it anything but ultra pure. :)
> It could be that methods for removing yttrium are already mature and only need to be applied to this case.
Sorry but no. That’s specially a problem they highlighted as needing a solution.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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?
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.)
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."
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......
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.
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.
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
If you want something way bigger but still ultralight and single-walled, Vargo Bot HD or Vargo BOT XL are like a larger version with a screw top threaded titanium lid (uses a silicone o-ring to seal).
Readit News
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...
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.
The current level of workability and cost and alloying is after that chicken and egg. Titanium is expensive because it is hard to manufacture, not just hard to work with, which limits demand. Titanium, to what we now know, is what it is. It’s the nature of the material not a lack of investment.
More realistically, the ROI isn’t there for most applications. Good aluminum is pretty darn good, massively easier to work, cheaper, etc. newer super steels have even made serious inroads on titanium parts because of workability and toughness.
[0] https://www.construction-physics.com/p/the-story-of-titanium
I used to have a magnesium campfire starter. It was a little ingot of magnesium, with a long flint, embedded along one side.
You used your knife to shave some magnesium, then the flint, to set it ablaze.
Worked a treat.
If something happens that ignites one of these pipelines there’s absolutely no way to put it out - it has the fuel (titanium) and oxidizer (chlorine) and burns mega-hot until one of them is fully consumed along the entire length of the pipeline. The pipelines can sometimes be shockingly long (1 mile-ish).
However, as you say, the processing costs from the raw metal to a finite product are much higher for titanium than for most cheap metals, mostly because of its low thermal conductivity (which makes titanium locally hot during processing) and its high reactivity with the atmosphere when hot, which is why the products made of titanium are expensive.
It is unlikely that titanium will ever replace stainless steel in most of its applications, but wherever the lower density of titanium or its better resistance against certain chemicals give great enough advantages, I hope to see more titanium objects.
I certainly like the titanium frame of my reading glasses, which is extremely thin and lightweight, almost invisible, while being much stronger and longer lived than a plastic frame would be.
Isn't that a problem for everything? That's the nature of heat.
Dead Comment
not anymore really. Kennametal and Sandvik all make insert tooling that will easily cut through Ti. Your multi-axis mills and CNC's will even track the tool wear for you and report when to replace. Titanium is no worse or better in your Haas than any other material in 2025.
and if youre still having problems, EDM will absolutely slice through it like butter.
nobody is working endmills or lathes with dry Ti and toolsteel in 2025. robots drown the piece in coolant and pick the right tools.
What he told me is titanium is not expensive, but the problem is with the tooling. Expensive, hard to work with and energy intensive .
It was cheaper than I thought to grab a chunk of 99.9 pure from McMaster but dang it's tough stuff. Tools hate it. It's gummy.
Upshot is it can be anodized at home with stuff almost anyone has.
it is a lot titanium outthere in retail.
The safety and security implementation, including assorted regulations, certificates, processes, regulators and the like, is as neccessary as it's... vexing. :)
Then again iron suits of armour are not cheap (though cheaper than titanium), and are mostly useless in the real world - but people have them. If you have the money I won't object you to getting one.
BTW - might HEMA have any safety regs, for equipment that could become a Class D fire? There might be hazmat issues transporting such armour by air.
EDIT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBook_G4#Titanium_(2001-20...
Dead Comment
> 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.
Very small amounts of oxygen in titanium are enough to make it too hard and too fragile for most applications.
Adding less harmful impurities to bind the more harmful impurities that cannot be otherwise removed (a.k.a. gettering) has always been a major purification technique, both in metallurgy and in semiconductor technology.
Steel is purified in the same way from the more harmful impurities, by adding other impurities like calcium, silicon or manganese or rare-earth metals.
In some cases, the compounds that result from adding impurities may be removed later, e.g. like slag floating on molten steel, but in other cases they may remain in the metal or semiconductor that is the desired end product.
It remains to be seen whether the extra yttrium and yttrium oxide that remain in titanium are harmful enough to make it worth to attempt to remove them somehow. In some cases they may even have beneficial properties, though e.g. for dental implants I would want commercially pure titanium that does not have any other metallic impurities like yttrium (commercially pure titanium includes small amounts of oxygen and of iron, both of which have no harmful effects in living tissues).
Every choice trades one problem for another. At a minimum, the new problem is the cost in resources - time, money, personal energy (and in business, usually reputation risk and political capital) - but usually the cost is much more than that, especially when looking at alternative technical solutions. In advice to clients I always present the options as the minimum trade-off (it's my job to minimize it).
More generally, the question is, which scenario of outcomes do you want? It could be the scenario with 1% yttrium is far better than the one with oxygen, or that the ytrrium scenario has a very different set of costs and benefits which make it valuable for certain needs that the oxygen scenario doesn't fulfill. It could be that methods for removing yttrium are already mature and only need to be applied to this case.
But especially in this case, the report is about research & development. If there were no more problems to solve then it wouldn't be R&D. It's really self-defeating to criticize progress in R&D because some problems remain. 'We scored a goal, but that's just trading one problem for another - the other team has the ball!'
The problem in this case is that the headline claimed “ultra pure titanium” and the closing paragraph had a tiny oh-by-the-way mention that the process contaminates the titanium with yttrium.
Which is to say, makes it anything but ultra pure. :)
> It could be that methods for removing yttrium are already mature and only need to be applied to this case.
Sorry but no. That’s specially a problem they highlighted as needing a solution.
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.
Yttrium: 28.9 USD/kg is 2890 USD/mt
So the 1% Yttrium might be financially reasonable (assuming extra demand can be met). Prices from metal.com
I’m shocked that yttrium is dearer than smelted titanium.
"Direct production of low-oxygen-concentration titanium from molten titanium" (2024) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-49085-4
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.)
What is the most efficient and sustainable alternative to yttrium for removing oxygen from titanium?
process(TiO2, …) => Ti, …
Works great on tea, plain H20 and anything I've put in it. Non reactive as far as I can tell and rugged too.
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.
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