Although titanium was discovered, it was never mined and used. Until 1910, American chemist Hunter used sodium to reduce titanium tetrachloride at a high temperature of 700-800℃ and obtained 99.9% metallic titanium for the first time. 1 g. This method is called the “Hunter Method”. However, the reducing agent used in the Hunter method is expensive sodium, which can only be used for small amounts of titanium. Can’t meet mass production. In 1932, Kroll, an American scientist from Luxembourg, used relatively cheap calcium to reduce titanium tetrachloride at a high temperature of more than 800 degrees and succeeded, and this began to be commercialized. A few years later, he replaced calcium with magnesium, which is easier to preserve. This method is still in use today and is known as the “Crower method.”
In 1948, DuPont of the United States discovered a new process for producing tons of titanium by magnesium reduction-vacuum distillation, which marked the beginning of industrial production of titanium. This process is divided into three steps: the first step is carbon dioxide to generate titanium tetrachloride TiO2+Cl2+2C=2CO+TiCl4; the second step uses magnesium to reduce the titanium tetrachloride TiCl4+2Mg → Ti+2MgCl2, and vacuum distillation is used to remove the magnesium chloride and the magnesium chloride in the titanium sponge. Excess magnesium to obtain pure titanium. In the third step, what comes out of the reactor is a porous, gray-like substance called sponge titanium.
Sponge titanium is melted into a liquid in an electric furnace before it can be cast into titanium ingots. Since the reaction needs to be carried out at a high temperature, it can be seen that the titanium material needs a lot of energy during the production process, which is the reason why the titanium material is expensive.
Because the titanium metal prepared by the Kraul method is of better quality, the production safety is higher. Therefore, at present, all countries in the world use the magnesium reduction-vacuum distillation method to produce sponge titanium. It is not difficult to find that it took more than one hundred years from the discovery of titanium to the production of pure titanium. And titanium has gradually entered people’s daily life, and it has been paid more and more attention by people, and its uses have become more and more extensive, and it has been truly utilized to a certain extent.
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