How to make titanium?
Actually, as raw ore, titanium is 100 times as abundant as copper. Nearly all white paint is white because of the titanium dioxide found in the ore. Something like four million tons a year go into paint, sunscreen, toothpaste, even paper. The high price of titanium comes not from the raw material but from the difficulty of turning that ore into wrenches and bike frames. At temperatures high enough to melt it, titanium exposed to air catches fire. So it has to be refined, forged, welded, and cast in a vacuum or under inert gas, an expensive process. Yet an author was able to make titanium using equipment he had lying around. he did it with thermite reduction, a process commonly used to weld train tracks. In an iron thermite reaction, iron oxide reacts with aluminum and comes out as liquid iron. I just swapped in titanium dioxide instead. But that reaction, in which titanium dioxide transfers its oxygen atoms to aluminum, doesn’t release enough heat to melt the materials. So he mixed in
