Difference between revisions of "Titanium"
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Natural TiO<sub>2</sub> mineral polymorphs: | Natural TiO<sub>2</sub> mineral polymorphs: | ||
Revision as of 01:32, 26 June 2021
In today's (2016...2017) conventional technology Titanium is a good structural building material (light strong and corrosion resistant). But today titanium but is rather expensive. Titanium is not at all a rare element but it's more distributed than other elements. More advanced mining techniques enabled by atomically precise technology will allow a significant drop in price.
Contents
Limits of corrosion resistance
Titanium in macroscopic chunks forms a stable self protecting oxide layer. If machine parts out of titanium become so small that the oxide layers become almost the thickness of the parts themselves (as in advanced atomically precise technology) then elemental titanium can't be used in direct contact with the oxygen bearing atmosphere. Even in a practically perfect vacuum or in an nonreactive noble gas environment elemental titanium (as probably all metals in elemental form) may only be usable at very low temperatures where the atoms stay in place albeit the weakness of the undirected metallic bonds.
Why titanium is one of the most useful metals
In advanced atomically precise manufacturing titanium will be very useful since titanium's oxidized forms with nonmetals (it's gemstones) usually have:
- very high hardness and
- very high melting points (See refractory material).
So they form very useful structural building materials.
Some simple titanium gemstones are: TiN TiP TiC TiSi2 TiB2 TiO2 Ti2O3
- Aluminium the most common metal in earths crust (thus more common than titanium) forms much viewer binary nonmetal compounds that are useful as structural building material (most useful: leukosapphire Al2O3). carbides nitrides and phosphides of aluminum are no useful building materials.
- Binary nonmetal compounds with the second most common element in earth's crust iron Iron are usually not very hard and are usually metallic and non-transparent (Fe2O3 Hematite, Fe3O4 Magnetite, FeS2 Pyrite).
- Binary nonmetal compounds with the common alkali metals Sodium and Potassium K are all water soluble or worse (reactive).
- Many of the binary nonmetal compounds with the common earth alkali metals Magnesium and Calcium are water soluble with a few exceptions (CaF Fluorite, MgO Periclase).
Stuff that reacted with water to a stable compound is usually too soft for structural building materials (there are exceptions).
Locations of occurrence and future usage
Titanium is especially abundant on the lunar lowlands. So there titanium might find more use than on earth. (See: [1]) On the moon volatiles elements (including carbon and nitrogen) seem to be rather scarce so TiN and TiC may be less likely to find massive use there.
Related
Natural TiO2 mineral polymorphs:
