Titanium Only – the e-zine about titanium metal and titanium applications

~The future of our economy, as the baby boomers ride off into the sunset, is going to be in high technology consumer goods, and a lot of these things benefit from precious metals, rare earth minerals, etc. Titanium is going to be huge, and it's already huge.~

badducky, contributor at the.fool.com, unorthodox investment tips website

Summary:

1. What has happened with of titanium in 2013?

2. New titanium applications

3. Updates of titaniumexposed.com

4. Titanium joke of the week

1. What has happened with of titanium in 2013

It seems that the financial and economic crisis has not yet subsided since latest edition of Titanium Only. It is also obvious that the continually fluid economic environment continually challenges the intelligence and creativity of the people in charge of things. They are still relentlessly seeking some kind of solution to what many have called - the end of the socio-economic system that we came to know and love in the last decades.

At least, this is what I’d like to believe about people that ought to know how to run, and, if necessary, fix things. It seems that the common world-wide adopted solution, to reduce consumption and to adopt fiscal consolidation policies (to be read ”tax increase”) is not as beneficial as many of our master economy analysts had predicted, judging by the increasing number of reports stating that austerity may not be the way to deal with the crisis.

In the mean time, the markets have tended to themselves, as usual, proving once more that their simple laws the demand and offer balance may be all that is needed.

How is titanium industry looking? Succinctly, the prices are going down. There haven’t been any radical corrections and there are some ups and downs, but a bird eye view on the long term data sheets shows a definite downward trend. I really think this is not the usual downward trend that all tradables exhibit during periods of economic turmoil (even gold seems to have reached a stalling point).

It’s more likely that we are currently witnessing a major fall of prices in titanium metal due to the pressure of advanced emerging manufacturing technologies that seek to off-set two of the factors that make industrial scale titanium so costly. We’re talking about the expensive, energy intensive refining process that transforms titanium ore into metal and the high rate of discarded material during the machining phase. We're going to talk in detail about some of them bellow.

Do check out titanium prices for charts with more specific information regarding pricing and follow Titanium exposed on Google Plus +

2. New titanium applications

As I mentioned earlier, new technologies are being employed in order to cut down the prices for finished products that are made of titanium.

An example that is becoming less and less spectacular each day is 3D printing. While the technology is nothing but new, being patented in the ‘80’s, it seems that it needed 30 years in order to gain sufficient traction in order to be successfully employed in industrial machining. The most common industrial application was until recently selective laser sintering of titanium powder, the finished products usually did not meet the highly restrictive conditions required by the classic fields of titanium applications – aero-space components.

Norsk Titanium Components recently patented a proprietary new plasma arc based Direct Metal Deposition (DMD) technology. It is presented as the first globally and commercially available technology of its kind. DMD technology enables large-scale, fully programmable means of achieving large and complex near net shape parts for industrial applications.

Contrary to other addictive layer manufacturing (ALM) technologies on the market, this seems to be the first industrial procedures to enables high productivity rates, the ability to produce large and small components, and unsurpassed process monitoring and control.

The real change is the work this company has employed, along with a tier 1 metal producer, in order to obtain Ti6Al4V material ready to be used in commercial aerospace applications. Together the companies claim to have achieved technology readiness level 6. Although they do not clarify which scale of TLR they are using, given the target field, they’re talking about aeronautics standard which would define TLR 6 like this: System/subsystem model or prototype demonstration in a relevant environment (ground or space).

The companies are currently working under a cooperative agreement to complete qualification of the process that will lead to widespread aerospace application. The qualification effort is expected to be complete in 2014 allowing structural designers to use the DMD process for new and existing airplane programs.

3. Titanium exposed updates

a) Self cleaning windows an interesting property of titanium dioxide, when applied on glass.
b) Titanium dioxide allergy – it has been a recurring request for many subscribers and I expect that it would be more developed in the future.

3. Titanium joke of the day

A man was seen fleeing down the hall of the hospital just before his operation. "What's the matter?" he was asked. “I’m having titanium screws installed in my leg to heal a fracture” 'Well, it’s a common procedure nowadays, very simple really, don't worry, I'm sure it will be all right." "Yeah, I know. I just heard the nurse telling it to my surgeon”.