Posted on 02/14/2013 8:43:12 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
ALUMINIUM was once more costly than gold. Napoleon III, emperor of France, reserved cutlery made from it for his most favoured guests, and the Washington monument, in America’s capital, was capped with it not because the builders were cheapskates but because they wanted to show off. How times change. And in aluminium’s case they changed because, in the late 1880s, Charles Hall and Paul Héroult worked out how to separate the stuff from its oxide using electricity rather than chemical reducing agents. Now, the founders of Metalysis, a small British firm, hope to do much the same with tantalum, titanium and a host of other recherché and expensive metallic elements including neodymium, tungsten and vanadium.
The effect could be profound. Tantalum is an ingredient of the best electronic capacitors. At the moment it is so expensive ($500-2,000 a kilogram) that it is worth using only in things where size and weight matter a lot, such as mobile phones. Drop that price and it could be deployed more widely. Neodymium is used in the magnets of motors in electric cars. Vanadium and tungsten give strength to steel, but at great expense. And the strength, lightness, high melting point and ability to resist corrosion of titanium make it an ideal material for building aircraft parts, supercars and medical implants—but it can cost 50 times as much as steel. Guppy Dhariwal, Metalysis’s boss, thinks however that the company can make titanium powder (the product of its new process) for less than a tenth of such powder’s current price.
At the moment, titanium is usually produced by the Kroll process...
(Excerpt) Read more at economist.com ...
>>Thankfull that Medicare paid for my titanium hip!!!<<
The taxpayers paid for your titanium hip.
“The taxpayers paid for your titanium hip.”
The amount of taxes I’ve had to pay over the years, I think i paid for it a few times over!
No, you paid for others to have similar treatments.
In any ponzi scheme it pays to get in early!!!
Tantalum (and Nairobium) is also used in different grades of carbide to increase edgewear and prevent plastic deformation when cutting alloy steels...
Thanks 2ndDivisionVet. Julian L. Simon is right again.
Ping
Print a SR-71.
That could take a while. But we could have our own drones
Thanks for the ping.
Or how about a light weight but superstrong coating of titanium down the center of a nylon barrel ~ you could 3D print that.
That's nothing.
Obama has turned tons of gold into lead.
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