Manufacturing Process Innovations: A “Bessemer Moment” For Titanium?

Manufacturing Manufacturing Process Innovations: A “Bessemer Moment” For Titanium? Willy Shih Senior Contributor Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. I teach at Harvard Business School, and I write about manufacturing New! Follow this author to improve your content experience. Got it! Jul 10, 2022, 07:00am EDT | Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin IperionX pilot titanium facility in Salt Lake City, Utah, built with funding from the U.

S. . .

. [+] Department of Energy’s ARPA-E program. IperionX comapny photo, used with permission I always have an eye out for major manufacturing process innovations because they can be highly disruptive to incumbent firms.

They often change the economics by allowing smaller scale or less costly production methods, maybe by using less energy or producing fewer unwanted byproducts. The other reason process innovations can be particularly exciting is because incumbent manufacturers are usually slow to adopt the new processes, often because they have existing production equipment that may not yet be fully depreciated. Or they could be fully depreciated and the marginal cost of using them is therefore very low.

This leaves the field open for upstarts to cause them pain and suffering, because the newcomers don’t have any existing assets to protect that might cloud their judgment . Is this about to happen in the production of the strategic metal titanium? I recently had the opportunity to talk with Anastasios “Taso” Arima, the founder and CEO of titanium start-up IperionX, who is scaling up a new production process. Arima started our discusssion by recounting an example of the importance of process innovations.

He explained that steel has been around for 3,000 years, but until 1856 it was a niche product because it was very expensive to make. Usually, it was militaries around the world who could afford to use it for making swords and armor, though people also used it for cutting tools like knives, axes, and saws. In the 18 th and early 19 th centuries, the invention of puddling furnaces made England the steel capital of the world, albeit in a very labor and energy intensive way.

In 1854 Henry Bessemer, who was working on military needs at the outbreak of the Crimean war, found that blowing air into molten iron rapidly converted it into steel. It was a violent process, though, and Bessemer solved this by running it inside a cylindrical steel pot that he called a converter. This led to a seven-fold increase in productivity, dramatically lowering the cost of steel.

But it was in America that the real scale-up happened as railroad building after the end of the Civil War caused booming demand for steel. Between 1864 and 1876, 13 Bessemer process factories were built in the U. S.

as American steel production expanded 87-fold. And as the price of steel fell, this wonderful material became much more widely used. The Bessemer Steel Process- Emptying a converter.

Illustration from the Bettmann Archive. Bettmann Archive I had called Taso to talk about their process innovation for making titanium. It is a new method that uses hydrogen instead of carbon: hydrogen assisted metallothermic reduction (HAMR).

HAMR promises to be both environmentally friendly as well as much lower cost, what Arima calls titanium’s “Bessemer moment. ” The process was developed by metallurgist and Professor of Metallurgical Engineering at the University of Utah, Dr. Z.

Zak Fang, under the sponsorship of the U. S. Department of Energy’s ARPA-E program, their version of DARPA.

“Our pilot plant is producing six tons per annum,” Arima explained about his prototype facility in Utah. “But that furnace is an old one that doesn’t have active cooling. For the new ones we’re not only looking to triple the capacity, but we also will reduce the cycle time from three days down to a day.

” The new furnace will produce 125 tons per annum, and the scaling strategy will be just to add furnaces in parallel. That easy scalability is important because the company can add capacity as demand warrants, rather than invest to build a huge factory and then have to find customers to keep it running. As I wrote recently after Russia (from where we were getting a lot of titanium) invaded Ukraine, titanium is a pretty unique metal.

It and its alloys are lightweight, highly resistant to corrosion, can withstand high temperatures, and have a very high ratio of strength to weight. This makes it very popular in the aerospace industry, but generally it is way too expensive to use in consumer products. The reason conventional production is expensive is because it uses the Kroll process to first convert titanium ores using coke (from metallurgical coal) and chlorine into titanium tetrachloride (TiCl 4 ).

The TiCl 4 then must be vacuum distilled to purify it, and the vapor is fed into a reaction vessel containing molten magnesium blanketed in inert argon gas and heated to 800 – 1000ºC for about two days. This yields titanium sponge that has to be crushed to have the magnesium salts removed. The HAMR process in contrast uses half the energy, cuts emissions by more than 30% (and to potentially zero if using renewable energy) to power the furnaces.

It substantially reduces the cost of producing titanium. The majority of savings come from eliminating both the chlorination step and the vacuum distillation. MORE FOR YOU Germany’s Renk Group Seeks To Revitalize An Iconic American Defense Manufacturer What Drives Newly Minted CRISPR Unicorn Mammoth Biosciences A Million Parts Using 3D Printing? Mantle’s Printed Tooling Powers Mass Production The company can also use titanium scrap as a feedstock.

The aerospace industry produces titanium alloy parts from forged ingots, and a large proportion of the materials are machined away and become scrap. One estimate was that of the 90 to 120 tons of titanium alloy parts used in the production of a Boeing 787, 85% of it became “swarf” – the metal chips removed by cutting tools. The swarf is collected and cleaned, and then can be remelted.

But inevitability the oxygen concentration is too high so it is difficult to produce high grade titanium from scrap. The HAMR process changes this because it can reduce the oxygen content in that scrap as it processes it. IperionX spherical titanium powder can be used in laser melt additive manufacturing.

IperionX company photo, used with permission Titanium spherical powder, the material the HAMR process produces, is ready for direct use in additive manufacturing. It typically sells for $150 – 250 a kilogram, according to Arima. He thinks they will be able to reduce manufacturing cost by over 75%.

Interestingly, the company is not targeting aerospace applications. “It takes too long to get qualified for flight applications,” he told me. They are looking instead at light-weighting applications in the automotive sector and consumer products.

I like that strategy a lot because it means they will get to “practice” and refine their processes for less demanding customers who will “pay their tuition” for them while they learn. Then as they get better, maybe they can go after aerospace. I still have my titanium-sheathed Mac PowerBook G4 circa 2005, but Apple AAPL switched to aluminum, probably because titanium then was far too expensive.

Maybe IperionX will change all of this and make it practical again. I told Taso that what I really wanted was titanium quarter panels for my car. That way I would feel more resilient driving around in Boston traffic.

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