ADMA Products, an Ohio based company has announced it will be increasing it's manufacture of titanium powder, after successfully running its process on a test scale.
Pilot production will go up from 5kg per cycle to 300kg per cycle, Vladimir Duz, director of research and development, told Metal-Pages at the opening of the International Titanium Association's Titanium 2011 conference and exhibition.
It will be taking place at its facility in the US, after the initial process was developed in Ukraine. The powder is created by using hydrogen in a vacuum to partially separate Kroll reaction mass before the titanium sponge is reconstituted.
ADMA has been focusing on making its products suitable and applicable for commercial and defence applications, with parts manufactured from ADMA's titanium hydride powder undergoing aerospace and military testing. Backing of this comes from companies such as Boeing and Goodrich, and the company worked last year with a Department of Energy grant. It has been making improvements to its process and has been achieving consistently high quality, with oxygen content in powder at max. 0.06%.
Following expansion, ADMA is forecasted to produce 200,000-250,000 lb per year of titanium powder from its pilot plant.
Meanwhile Australia's state funded CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation) is also planning to increase its pilot plant production to test the commercial viability of its fluid bed process for manufacturing titanium powder.
CSIRO has now succeeded in reducing oxygen content to acceptable levels, however it needs to focus on ensuring the cost of production of titanium parts via its powder route remains competitive with that of titanium sponge. If it does not, the alternative would be to take the sponge route, still using CSIRO proprietary process. The TiRO process is based on traditional Kroll-process chemistry - the reduction of titanium from titanium tetrachloride using magnesium as reagent - however it is a continuous process using fluid bed reactor, with titanium separated from magnesium chloride in the form of powder. Going via the powder route minimises iron contamination and has the benefit of minimising waste, as powder can be pressed and sintered into net shapes, as opposed to the need to smelt sponge into ingot or billet which then needs rolling or casting or forging and cutting or machining into shape, all of which ends up with part of the raw material going into scrap.
However, although it has come down over years of development, pound-for-pound the cost of producing powder is yet to catch up with traditional Kroll-process sponge, and the small-scale nature of production continues to limit bulk applications, such as sheet and plate which have been successfully made from titanium powders. Another issue hampering commercial adoption of powder is the greater risk of oxygen contamination which can make end parts prone to brittleness - a critical issue in aerospace and defence applications - which can be solved by process control.
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Source; Metal Pages
