so here we have a sample of titanium
wire titanium is a really quite
fantastic metal it's very very
lightweight and very very strong it's
used in construction materials very low
concentrations and as additives for
Alloys titanium is a very interesting
element and it's interesting because
it's very abundant on the planet it's
not the most abundant metal but it's
still pretty abundant this is a periodic
table where the area
of each of the elements
here represents the relative amount of
this material that is found on the earth
as you can see there's a lot of oxygen a
lot of carbon quite a lot of
boron Debb's favorite element some
aluminium again a lot and here titanium
is quite a reasonable amount nearly as
much as potassium so it's a very common
element so going to open it now and
we'll hopefully see the titanium wire
around the spindle so you can see it's a
really quite beautiful dark
coloration you can find large deposits
of titanium dioxide in various places
across the world we've just had a
visitor from South Africa who said not
far from where he works in East London
along the coast their large deposits of
titanium dioxide the problem is that it
is really quite hard to make titanium
metal out of the oxide because titanium
atoms bond strongly to the oxygen and
it's difficult to get them apart and get
the
metal and the reason why people want to
get the metal is because it's very light
here I've got a piece of titanium and
it's quite light you can see I can shake
it around in my hands without behaving
as as if it was a really heavy bar often
used as well in the construction of
aerospatial sort of capsules and
components to go into space because it's
light and strong being light by itself
is not much
use sodium is light the great thing
about titanium is that it is light and
it's strong and also it doesn't react
with water you couldn't make a car out
of sodium the first rainstorm and boom
but titanium is light it is strong so if
you're making a vehicle out of it the
vehicle isn't very heavy so you don't
need nearly as much fuel than if you're
making the vehicle out of steel usually
people make the vehicle out of aluminium
which is lighter than steel but is not
nearly as strong and the great thing
about titanium is it's fantastically
strong once you get the metal so the
problem getting the metal is from
titanium dioxide titanium dioxide is a
white powder in fact you can see it
around you if you look around the room
you're in almost certainly the walls are
white with titanium dioxide it's a very
cheap white pigment normally what
happens in the process for making
titanium metal is that first of all it
is converted to Titanium tetrachloride
TI
cl4 and if you just leave it as titanium
tetrachloride in the air it will react
with the air with water in the air and
go back to titanium dioxide you haven't
achieved anything in fact one of my
colleagues Rich
born showed Brady earlier what happens
with this reaction I've never seen it
but I had to stay in my office and work
however you can take titanium
tetrachloride and convert it to the
metal and once you've got the metal it's
pretty unreactive
provided that you keep it cold if you
put titanium at high temperatures in
oxygen it will burn so there are some
processes where you would like to use
the strength of titanium but because
there's oxygen there it's not
safe but cars and most airlanes don't
get hot enough for the burning in oxygen
to be a problem so it is a fantastic
material and if we could solve the pro
problem of how to make titanium metal
cheaply in terms of the energy needed to
convert the oxide into the metal then we
could have cars that were far more fuele
efficient and cheaper to run so it's a
really good goal tianium is used at the
moment in applications where strength
and lightness is more important than
cost if you're building fighter
aircraft where of course cost is
important you but you need it to be
pretty light or you can't can't get to
the speeds that you need to shoot down
the enemy and so on then they will use
titanium Alloys if those are
best you often use titanium for very
high pressure
applications when chemists want to do
experiments at high pressure they will
often use titanium
because again it is very light and again
strong it is also has a great advantage
that it's
non-magnetic and when you want to for
example do experiments in a high
magnetic field when you need something
strong you can't use steel because your
apparatus will be pulled away by the
magnet and nothing will work so titanium
has a very
special applications which can be very
useful but they could be so much more
useful if we could apply it more widely
it's used where you really need strength
and where money is not terribly
important is in hip implants in your hip
you want to have something that's very
strong and very light each time you move
your leg you don't want to be moving a
cannonball or something really heavy but
you want it to be really strong
and so again very often hip implants
will be made out of titanium the piece
that goes into your leg is made out of
titanium and ends in a ball and the part
that goes into your pelvis is often made
of polythene plastic so that you get the
ball and socket effect well one of the
most interesting applications of
titanium is as a catalyst for making
polythene
polyethylene the material material that
is used particularly for plastic
buckets and other plastic
objects and ethylene was first
polymerized turned into plastic some
people call it ethine rather ethylene
was turned into plastic before the
second world war with a very high press
reaction that produced a material that
was rather soft and you couldn't for
example use for making buckets and then
in the 1950s
um a German chemist called Zigler he
discovered partly also working with
Italian chemist called NATA that if you
take a titanium compound and an
aluminium compound together this was a
really good Catalyst and by really good
I mean one gram of this Catalyst could
produce a ton of
plastic so that because titanium is
relatively cheap it means you don't even
have to get the Catalyst out of the
plastic because there's so little of it
in the plastic you can just afford to
sell it when your plastic bucket without
losing much money does that mean there's
probably a little bit of titanium in my
plastic bucket at home
yes and there's probably more titanium
from the fact that you cleaned your
paintbrush when you were painting your
kitchen or bedroom with white paint so
there's titanium