Del Rosario Maria Arielle Johnna Veronica G.

2011-31062
Titanium and Its Marketability
Titanium is a solid silver transition metal discovered in 1790 by an English Pastor by the name of
William Gregor. He named it Mennacanite after the place where he first encountered the
magnetic black sand. The discovery was later acknowledged and supported by German
Chemist, Martin Heinrich Klaproth and he named the element Titanium, after the Greek
mythological creatures called the Titans.
Titanium is one of the most abundant metals in the lithosphere or the earths surface. It is ninth in
abundance, exceeding the abundance of zinc, copper and lead combined. It occurs almost
everywhere, being a surface metal - in rocks and minerals, clays, coal and oil, water, volcanoes
and meteorites it can even be found in animals (including us humans), plants and stars!
However many people still believe that titanium is a rare metal. This notion is a direct result of
the fact that Titanium has not yet breached the commercial world because of its highly expensive
production process. Its expensive production is brought about by certain properties of Titanium
which makes it especially hard to produce its pure elemental form. For starters the melting point
of titanium is 16600C which is relatively high compared to other more common metals like
aluminum. This means than it requires almost twice as much energy and fuel as aluminum in
order to obtain the consumers desired design or shape. Another more important property of
titanium is its high tendency to bond with carbon, nitrogen and oxygen making it harder to
extract pure titanium from its ore. It took a decade of experiments, which started in the 1880s,
involving the isolation of the pure metal compound