Titanium content in the earth's crust is very rich, China's titanium resources ranked first in the world, the proved reserves of about 38.8%, distributed in more than 20 provinces in more than 100 mining areas, mainly concentrated in southwest, central south and north China. Vanadium-titano-magnetite in Panxi area is a world-renowned comprehensive deposit with very rich reserves, accounting for 92% of China's titanium resources, providing a strong resource base for China's titanium industry. However, at present the craft of producing titanium long cycle, high energy consumption, serious pollution of titanium is expensive, largely limits the use of titanium, and thus the development of new low cost titanium production methods, to accelerate the development of the current titanium resources in the world big country to the shift of titanium production power has the profound significance.
Traditional titanium metallurgy process
The traditional titanium smelting process is "Klauer method", which uses metal sodium or metal magnesium to reduce titanium tetracloride to get metal titanium. Since titanium is produced below the melting point of titanium, the resulting titanium metal is spongy and is therefore called "titanium sponge".
There are three main processes in the Klauer process: the preparation of ti-rich materials, the preparation of titanium tetracloride and the reduction distillation to produce titanium sponge.
Titanium rich materials are usually prepared from ilmenite to remove iron and enrich titanium components as much as possible. TiCl4 is prepared from chlorine by converting titanium components from oxides to chloride, including chlorination and refining. Titanium sponge was obtained by the reduction distillation of titanium tetracloride with steam of magnesium metal and the mixture reaction of titanium tetracloride and steam of magnesium at 900℃.
However, the krol process is not continuous, the process is long, the process is many, and TiCl4 is volatile and corrosive at room temperature, so the production cost of titanium sponge is very high, which limits the application of titanium in various industries.
New process of titanium metallurgy
In order to reduce the production cost of titanium, many new methods of titanium extraction have been explored, including TiCl4 electrolysis process, ITP(Armstrong) process, FFC process, OS process, prereduction molding process (PRP), QT process and MER process.
