Titanium is what a lot of dream bikes are made of. Engineers have been increasing looking at this metal in the automotive and aviation fields. The benefits are simple: titanium is light, strong and almost immune to corrosion. If the cost was not a limiting factor, titanium would replace most of the steel in your car. With titanium your car would consume less gasoline, run faster, and be safer.

Two chemical engineers from the University of Cambridge, George Zheng Chen and Derek Fray, are trying to develop a come up with a new way processing titanium. They are developing an electrochemical technique to refine pure titanium from titanium dioxide. Titanium is the fourth most common element in the Earth, but it is found as titanium dioxide. To separate oxygen from titanium is very slow and environmentally hazardous process that drives up its cost.

The Cambridge researchers have developed a titanium conductive crucible. The idea is to charge positively the oxygen atoms from titanium dioxide to allow them to separate themselves from titanium atoms. This is done by submerging a graphite electrode in molten salt of calcium chloride. The oxygen atoms seperate from the graphite electrodes and form carbon dioxide (graphite is only a manifestation of pure carbon as well as diamond is too). This process is cheap and only produces CO2 as residue, what is not a great problem from the environmental point of view, because it can be easily recycled.

Could the lead to the end of steel?