Although titanium was discovered, it has not been mined for use until 1910, American chemist Hunter reduced titanium tetrachloride with sodium at 700-800℃, and for the first time obtained 99.9% titanium metal, but the total is less than 1 gram. This approach is known as the Hunt method. However, the reducing agent used in Hunter's process is expensive sodium and can only be used in small quantities for the preparation of titanium. Not enough for mass production. In 1932, Kroll, an American scientist from Luxembourg, succeeded in reducing titanium tetrachloride with relatively cheap calcium at a high temperature of more than 800 degrees Celsius, which began to be commercialized. A few years later, he replaced calcium with magnesium, which is easier to preserve, in a process still used today known as the Klauer process.
In 1948, DuPont Company in the United States discovered a new process to produce titanium by tons by magnesium reduction-vacuum distillation, which marked the beginning of industrial production of titanium. This process is divided into three steps: the first step is to generate titanium tetrachloride TiO2+Cl2+2C=2CO+TiCl4 from carbon dioxide; the second step is to reduce titanium tetrachloride TiCl4+2Mg → Ti+2MgCl2 with metal magnesium; the vacuum distillation is used to remove magnesium chloride and excess magnesium in titanium sponge, so as to obtain pure titanium. The third step, coming out of the reactor, is a porous, sponge-looking gray substance called titanium sponge.
welded titanium tube supplier believes that the titanium sponge is melted into a liquid in an electric furnace before being cast into titanium ingots. Since the reaction needs to be carried out at high temperatures, it can be seen that titanium materials require a lot of energy in the production process, which is why it is expensive.
Because the metal titanium prepared by Klauer process is of better quality, the production safety is higher. Therefore, all countries in the world are using magnesium reduction - vacuum distillation to produce titanium sponge. It is not difficult to find that it took more than one hundred years from the discovery of titanium to the production of pure titanium. And titanium has gradually stepped into People's Daily life, more and more attention, more and more widely used, to a certain extent to get real use.
Titanium and titanium alloy can be widely used in civil, national defense, economy, science and technology and other fields, and the development of titanium industry to a certain extent also reflects a country's high-tech material technology application level and the development of manufacturing industry, so the quality stability, forging and calendering processing technology requirements are relatively high. The smelting process of titanium includes: titanium slag smelting process, chlorination process, refining process, reduction distillation process and other links, and the technical difficulty of the links is relatively high, in order to form large-scale and industrial production, but also need to solve the technical problems of process control and management of the whole process, otherwise it will cause a waste of resources and a large increase in production costs.
In the future, the strategic significance of production of high-end titanium materials is more significant, and the transfer of product structure to high-end becomes the inevitable trend of its development. Domestic petrochemical, aerospace, electric power, ocean engineering, sports and leisure industries continue to maintain strong demand for high-end titanium products, while computer and other high-tech industries for titanium demand growth points are also emerging, promoting the development of titanium products to the high-end field. The high-end development of domestic titanium industry has been supported by both policy and market guidance. In addition, national defense construction matching the improvement of economic strength will also promote the transfer of Chinese titanium industry to high-end fields, and gradually improve the advantage of the industrial chain. Therefore, only by constantly improving the technical indicators, developing energy saving and environmental protection technology, and have core competitiveness in product quality can enterprises achieve continuous development. The resulting titanium and titanium alloy processing of the industry will be more and more high technical requirements for enterprises, which constitutes a higher technical barrier to the later entry of enterprises.