Great article! Sad it's so USA-centric. It would be great to read "Soviet part" of titanium
A little info in the subject.
https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/28152/when-and-h...
The story of titanium
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Re: The story of titanium
#72How can titanium be both a "streetwalker" and "incredibly corrosion-resistant"?
same as aluminum, it immediately forms a hard and adherent oxide layer upon exposure to air or especially water
Re: The story of titanium
#73This is the 5th time this story has been posted here. None of the other times received any comments and only a few points.
The timing of the submission is far more important than the nature of the article.
Time of day, time of week, other prominent distractions, etc have an increasingly outsized influence.
Re: The story of titanium
#74Resting next to me is a titanium ring, it is extremely light, resistant to ambient temp change, and is usually cool to the touch. It cost $15 or so. It wears in a really beautiful way, aging like it's enjoying itself. On my finger is a tungsten carbide ring, it's extremely dense (that of gold, slightly heavier than uranium), and has a lot of interesting properties. It's warmed quickly by my fingers, and rings the mos…
I wear a titanium ring too and keep my real one safely locked away. It’s an incredible metal that I proudly wear around. Mine cost about the same. I also have a titanium pocketknife (James Brand), carabiner, keyrings, pens, camera (fujifilm makes a few), and some beloved snow peak dishes. And the silly titanium iPhone. It’s such a great metal to make things to carry with.
Do you mind sharing where you got the titanium keyrings and carabiners?
I've been searching forever for decent keyrings. There's a few carabiners (though the titanium ones are hard to find there too, and usually covered in obnoxious branding). But keyrings especially seem to be an under-served market. There's either (1) the usual mass-produced, flimsy, cheap garbage, or (2) something tougher and more expensive, but covered in branding.
I've settled with (2) for now (though it's not even titanium), but it'd be nice to not have to look at a giant billboard every time I pull out my keys.
Re: The story of titanium
#75Huge fan of Titanium. If only we could find a cheap way to get the metal out of titanium dioxide. Like a Haber process-level breakthrough. Then we could start replacing steel with titanium in many applications. Think entire freight trains, cargo ships, containers, cars, trucks, tractors -- all that heavy steel replaced by titanium alloys. Enormous quantities of fuel and energy saved by lower density and higher streng…
I think it could be one of those 'grass-is-greener' scenarios. Steel is really nice to work with. It's strong and elastic and you can do all sorts of things to alter its properties, like even in a home shop.
Titanium always looks really hard to work with, just from the few times I've seen youtube types get some into their lathe chucks.
Would the added (in some ways just different) performance make up the difference? No idea. I mean, would people use so much aluminium if it wasn't straightforward to extrude it into interesting shapes? I don't think I would.
The straight characteristics of a material are one thing: what you can actually do with it are another.
Re: The story of titanium
#76Love titanium, something so cool about it. It’s like steel with no downsides. I’ve got 5 ti bikes and a few ti watches, one of my favorite pieces though is my snow peak double wall titanium mug.
What makes the mug particularly good? Always interested in something to improve coffee and recently broke my favourite one.
Titanium is not good for flavor, its good for strength to weight ratio for people concerned with weight (think EDC, ultralight, etc)
Re: The story of titanium
#77Almost everything about the article is wrong, oversimplified, or misleading. Take this paragraph, for instance: > But despite its abundance, it's only recently that civilization has been able to use titanium as a metal (titanium dioxide has been in use somewhat longer as a paint pigment). Because titanium so readily bonds with oxygen and other elements, it doesn’t occur at all in metallic form in nature. One engineer…
> The same also applies to aluminum, magnesium, nickel, etc.
the oxides of aluminum, magnesium, and nickel were not in use as paint pigments
> What distinguishes iron and copper from aluminum and titanium is the energy required to split the oxide into metal. (...) Titanium is not more reactive than aluminum
the particularly relevant issue here, as i understand it, is that titanium has a stable carbide, which prevents you from reducing it carbothermically; you end up with titanium carbide instead of titanium metal. aluminum's carbide is unstable even in water, while iron's carbide is mechanically strong but still easy to reduce to iron with air. copper's carbide is poorly characterized and even more unstable, and it even occurs native
there are other things that titanium reacts more strongly with than aluminum does. titanium tetrachloride, for example, which is mentioned in the article, isn't a mere salt like normal chlorides; it's a volatile fuming liquid, because titanium forms covalent bonds with the chlorine like a motherfucking nonmetal. you can argue about whether this makes it more or less reactive than aluminum in this context; the reaction produces more energy per metal atom but less energy per chlorine atom
this kind of dirty trick is why titanium wasn't isolated until decades after the creation of metallic calcium, sodium, potassium, aluminum, and even the isolation of some of the rare earths
so i think the characterization in the article is fair
Re: The story of titanium
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fatigue is why we use steel for everything, no other alloys have the practical strength and infinite life.
You are correct in that steel is harder and stiffer than titanium. Steel is also more re-usable, smelt-able than titanium. However, when it comes to fatigue (which I assume, you are referring to fracture strain) titanium has a significant edge. The fracture strain for steel is roughly 15%, but for titanium alloys, it often reaches and exceeds 50%. I don't say this to contradict you, but to point out that as with most…
A better argument for steel is it requires 5-10 kwhr/kg to produce vs 60kwhr/kg for aluminum and 250kwhr/kg for titanium. So for the same energy you get 6 times more steel than aluminum and 25 times more than titanium. Which seems to say when the properties of steel are acceptable it's the cheaper option.
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2009/06/how-much-energy-do...
Re: The story of titanium
#79Huge fan of Titanium. If only we could find a cheap way to get the metal out of titanium dioxide. Like a Haber process-level breakthrough. Then we could start replacing steel with titanium in many applications. Think entire freight trains, cargo ships, containers, cars, trucks, tractors -- all that heavy steel replaced by titanium alloys. Enormous quantities of fuel and energy saved by lower density and higher streng…
I think it could be one of those 'grass-is-greener' scenarios. Steel is really nice to work with. It's strong and elastic and you can do all sorts of things to alter its properties, like even in a home shop. Titanium always looks really hard to work with, just from the few times I've seen youtube types get some into their lathe chucks. Would the added (in some ways just different) performance make up the difference?…
maybe if the blast furnace hadn't been invented nearly a thousand years ago we wouldn't be so familiar with the techniques that work well on steel
Re: The story of titanium
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
For most non-architectural design goals striking the right balance of toughness strength and hardness is generally what you want correct? I would imagine for building a bridge you care much more about elasticity and creep strength.
Also fatigue resistance. Bicycle design is a good example of where this matters: steel has a significant fatigue limit, and can endure cyclic stresses below that limit indefinitely. Aluminum has no fatigue limit, so any flexing is inevitably eating away at fatigue life. Thus aluminum bike frames have to be made much stronger and stiffer than otherwise necessary, to avoid bikes breaking unexpectedly due to fatigue. An…
Right now, top quality steel bike frames at the minimum bike weight allowed by the UCI are stronger than top quality carbon fibre bike frames of the same weight. Aluminum frames of the same weight would not be considered usable probably... (Pro cyclists would still use carbon fibre bikes because they can be made more aerodynamic).