A novel chemical pathway for energy efficient production of Ti metal from upgraded titanium slag

The developments of energy efficient, low cost titanium metal production processes have challenged the metallurgical industry and research community around the world for several decades. The strong affinity of titanium to oxygen dictates that the conventional Ti metal production processes are energy-intensive. In this paper, a new approach that is designed to minimize energy consumption and overall cost for Ti production is presented. The overall approach is based on a chemical pathway that synergistically integrating a series of low cost unit processes to produce Ti that can match the quality of the product produced by the Kroll process commercially to date. The key steps include production of purified TiO2 with controlled sizes and morphologies, Mg reduction in the presence of hydrogen to form porous TiH2, heat treatment to close the pores, and Ca de-oxygenation to reduce oxygen content to less than 0.15 wt%. The results show that this approach can indeed produce Ti metal powder that has high purity, low oxygen, and meets the specifications by ASTM for general purpose Ti sponge, directly from upgraded titanium slag (UGS) without the high temperature chlorination step.