Titanium Uses

Due to excellent resistance to sea water, it is used to make propeller shafts and rigging and in the heat exchangers of desalination plants and in heater-chillers for salt water aquariums. Owing to its high stiffness it is favoured in place of steel in high performance model sailplane wing join rods. It is used to produce relatively soft artificial gemstones. Titanium tetrachloride is used as an iridized coating for glass. Because it fumes strongly in moist air it is also used for skywriting! Titanium is an important pigment for industrial, domestic and artistic applications, as it is extremely opaque and sun fast. This latter property is also exploited in sunscreen applications. Because it is physiologically inert and can Osseo integrate, titanium is a choice material for joint replacement and tooth implants, and body piercing. Titanium alloys are also used in eyeglass frames. This results high-end, but resistant and longlasting frame. Both traditional alloys and shape memory alloys find use in this application. Even golf clubs are made with titanium. Even architectural applications of titanium exist, for instance the Guggenheim and the Cerritos Library that are sheathed in titanium panels. Apple computers recently put a titanium laptop computer on the market, for its light weight. Titanium has potential use in desalination plants for converting sea water into fresh water. How is Titanium extracted? You cant use carbon reduction so that means that you have to use an alternative reducing agent. In the case of titanium, the reducing agent is either sodium or magnesium. Both of these would, of course, first have to be extracted from their ores by expensive processes.

Conversion of titanium(IV) oxide, TiO2, into titanium(IV) chloride, TiCl4 The ore retile (impure titanium(IV) oxide) is heated with chlorine and coke at a temperature of about 900C.

Other metal chlorides are formed as well because of other metal compounds in the ore. Very pure liquid titanium(IV) chloride can be separated from the other chlorides by fractional distillation under an argon or nitrogen atmosphere, and is stored in totally dry tanks.

Note: Titanium(IV) chloride is a typical covalent chloride. It is a colourless liquid which fumes in moist air due to reaction with water to give titanium(IV) oxide and fumes of hydrogen chloride. Everything has to be kept very dry to prevent this happening.

Reduction of the titanium(IV) chloride Reduction by sodium This is the method which is used in the UK. The titanium(IV) chloride is added to a reactor in which very pure sodium has been heated to about 550C - everything being under an inert argon atmosphere. During the reaction, the temperature increases to about 1000C.

After the reaction is complete, and everything has cooled (several days in total - an obvious inefficiency of the batch process), the mixture is crushed and washed with dilute hydrochloric acid to remove the sodium chloride.
Note: To save you the bother of asking, I have no idea why hydrochloric acid is used to do this rather than just water!

Reduction by magnesium This is the method used in the rest of the world. The method is similar to using sodium, but this time the reaction is:

The magnesium chloride is removed from the titanium by distillation under very low pressure at a high temperature.