Fundamental study on magnesiothermic reduction of titanium dichloride
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ODUCTION
THE industrial production of titanium metal began about half a century ago after the development of the magnesiothermic reduction of titanium tetrachloride (TiCl4).[1] Subsequently, the titanium production process, referred to as the Kroll process, was continuously improved; however, its basic principle has not changed. In these 50 years, the production volume of the reduction process has increased and the energy consumption rate has improved dramatically.[2] The Kroll process has many advantages such as its ability to produce high-purity titanium with a low oxygen content. However, the reduction process employed in current titanium production based on the Kroll process involves a labor-intensive batch-type process and its productivity is extremely low.[3,4] Although the demand for titanium metal is growing all over the world,[5] further improvement in its productivity by the Kroll process appears to be difficult. For further diversification of the applications of titanium metal, a new titanium production process with low cost and high productivity is required. In order to overcome the disadvantages of the Kroll process, new titanium production processes employing the direct reduction of titanium dioxide (TiO2), such as the FFC Cambridge process[6] developed by Fray et al., the OS process[7] developed by Ono and Suzuki, the EMR/ MSE process,[8] the preform reduction process (PRP)[9] developed by Okabe et al., and the POLAR* titanium *POLAR is a trademark of BHP Billiton Innovation Pty Ltd., Newcastle, Australia.
process[10] developed by the researchers at BHP Billiton, are currently being investigated. These new processes have the potential to supply low-cost titanium; however, several technical problems must be resolved before a large-scale commercial process can be established. Meanwhile, new
OSAMU TAKEDA, Graduate Student, and TORU H. OKABE, Associate Professor, are with the Institute of Industrial Science, University of Tokyo, Tokyo 153-8505, Japan. Contact e-mail: [email protected] or [email protected] Manuscript submitted January 6, 2006. METALLURGICAL AND MATERIALS TRANSACTIONS B
titanium production processes employing chloride metallurgy are also being investigated. This is because chloride metallurgy can produce high-quality titanium by using an oxygen-free system, which is an essential advantage.[11–15] With the preceding background, the authors are developing a new high-speed and (semi-)continuous titanium production process based on the magnesiothermic reduction of titanium subchlorides, titanium dichloride (TiCl2), or titanium trichloride (TiCl3).[16–19] The flow diagram of this new titanium production process—called the subhalide reduction process—is shown in Figure 1. Since the detailed characteristics of the subhalide reduction process were discussed in the previous article,[18,19] they have only been briefly described in this article. As shown in Figure 1, the subhalide reduction process comprises three major steps: (1) production of titanium subchloride (TiClx, x 5 2, 3), (2) e
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