Interview from the September/October 2022 issue, posted online in January 2023. Taso Arima discusses IperionX’s strategy at that time; capabilities, prices and prospects should be read in that historical context.
Titanium serves applications ranging from aerospace and implants to jewelry and heat exchangers. Its attractions include strength-to-weight ratio and corrosion resistance. It is not rare in the Earth’s crust, but obtaining metal of the required purity and processing it remains demanding and costly. IperionX aims to address that production chain.
This manufacturing and economic context has drawn the attention of Anastasios “Taso” Arima, Founder and CEO of IperionX, who has made it a key business goal to revitalize a low cost, low carbon U.S. titanium industry.
“Titanium has the potential to be a key critical material that can be substituted for more widely used higher-carbon metals, particularly stainless steel and aluminum. It is a superior metal to stainless steel and aluminum due to its properties such as high strength-to-weight ratio and excellent corrosion resistance and is critical to the global aerospace, medical, space and defense sectors. Not to mention, titanium was listed in the top 50 minerals deemed essential to the economic and national security by U.S. Department of the Interior”, Taso told 3D ADEPT Media.
Taso’s comparison is application-dependent, not superiority on every selection criterion. Titanium appears on the 2022 US list of 50 critical minerals; the list is not a ranking of material performance.
At the time, IperionX presented a US industrial strategy spanning titanium supply and metal production. Taso Arima describes bringing together a Tennessee mineral project and metal-processing technologies.
“I successfully developed one of the leading lithium projects in North America, Piedmont Lithium. Once that project was well advanced and with a strong management team in place, I began to look at other supply chains in the United States that are vulnerable and need to be re-shored; titanium was a standout. We identified very quickly that both titanium mineral and metal supply chains need to be rebuilt in the U.S., and we have secured a very large mineral deposit in Tennessee, and have combined it with an advanced, highly sustainable titanium metal production technology”, Taso points out.
Reported milestones at the time included partnership with ORNL, production of low-carbon spherical titanium, a Nasdaq listing and a partnership with Panerai on titanium watches.
The company describes several production routes, including titanium scrap recycling and mineral-derived feedstock processing. The ability to use 100% scrap feedstock does not mean all production uses that route or that the overall process has no losses or emissions.
How does the production process work?
In order to understand the capabilities of these production processes, it’s crucial to shed light on the various grades of titanium for outsiders to this sphere. Indeed, determining that titanium is the correct metal for a production is one thing, choosing the right grade of this material is another one – and certainly one of the most crucial steps as the right grade is essential to ensure a successful completion of a production.
Four commercial pure titanium grades (grades 1, 2, 3 and 4) have been identified on the manufacturing market. As far as titanium alloys are concerned, some of the widely-known grades include Grade 5 (Ti 6Al-4V) Titanium, grades 7, 12 and 23 (Ti 6AL-4V ELI).
Properties vary with grade, composition, impurity content and metallurgical condition. Corrosion resistance, strength, ductility and thermal behavior must therefore be assessed for the intended application.
Taso cites a spherical Ti-6Al-4V (Ti64) powder, reporting that his team met the targeted Grade 5 specifications. This widely used industrial alloy does not represent all uses of titanium.
Heat-treatment, welding and temperature capabilities depend on the selected specification and component condition. A temperature figure alone is not a service limit for every printed part.
Titanium alloys serve aerospace parts, industrial equipment and certain medical devices. Grade, process and treatments require appropriate selection and qualification; standard Grade 5 and an extra-low-interstitial grade such as Grade 23 are not interchangeable without justification.
According to IperionX’s 2022 description, to produce such a high-quality spherical titanium alloy powder and make it compatible with AM, the IperionX team relies on a three-step patented production process: they sourced medium grade titanium minerals (ilmenite) that they upgraded to a +99% titanium dioxide feedstock using the proprietary Synthetic Rutile and Alkaline Roasting and Hydrolysis (“ARH”) process technologies. They blended the high-grade titanium feedstock with oxides of the alloying elements and reduced it using the patented Hydrogen Assisted Metallothermic Reduction (“HAMR”) technology to obtain angular titanium powders. The last step consists in utilizing the patented Granulation Sintering Deoxygenation (“GSD”) technology to produce the high-quality spherical titanium powder alloy Ti64.
Taso then turns to the separate route using titanium scrap:
“We can process this scrap metal to create angular and spherical titanium powder as commercially pure titanium, or as various titanium alloys to be used in applications including additive manufacturing and powder metallurgy”, Taso explains.
While the conventional Kroll process continues to be the dominant technology for the production of titanium metal, the founder of IperionX outlines that avoiding this process has enabled the team to bypass a series of energy intensive titanium melt processes, ingot manufacturing, wire production and gas atomization, which in the end take time, increase the final cost of the material and are not necessarily environmental-friendly.
How sustainable IperionX’ proprietary titanium metal processing technologies are?
As discussed with Michela Ferraro-Cuda in the article dedicated to precious metals AM (page 29 of this edition of 3D ADEPT Mag), “an organization can truly say it is sustainable when it is responsible vis-à-vis these three aspects: it should be profitable, and responsible vis-à-vis its people and the planet.”
Assessing these routes requires feedstock, energy, reagents, recovery, losses and downstream steps to be considered. IperionX’s account sets out its circularity strategy; it does not replace a life-cycle assessment with a defined boundary.
“In our current economy, we often take materials from the Earth, make products from them, and eventually throw them away as waste – the process is linear. Companies in the minerals industry tend to produce a lot of waste with their processes and then products aren’t recycled. Right now, a significant amount of titanium scrap ends up in the landfill and is too hard to recycle because of its high oxygen levels, but with our technology that is all going to change. Our HAMR technology enables us to significantly lower the oxygen content in titanium produced from scrap metal, and enables a fully recycled, high quality, integrated and low-cost supply chain of titanium”, the company’s representative highlights.
The following diagram shows IperionX’s 2022 comparison of conventional processing and its technologies. It depicts production routes; it is not by itself a measured carbon footprint.
Taso underlines: “Our technologies can produce titanium from either 100% scrap titanium or from conventional titanium minerals. Whilst this image shows the production of titanium metal from titanium minerals, which we have the potential to sustainably source from our Titan Project in Tennessee, we can also do exactly the same thing but with titanium scrap”.
A February 2017 ARPA-E report describes a University of Utah techno-economic simulation using ExtendSim for large-scale production.
In that model, HAMR used 50% less energy and produced 30% fewer emissions than Kroll, including additional purification. Results depend on boundaries and assumptions; they are not IperionX plant measurements.
For GSD, it estimated cost savings above 50%. Scale-up remained a challenge.
In the long-run, from a cost standpoint and thanks to partnerships with organizations such as ORNL, Taso said their “process will potentially be able to lower manufacturing costs by over 75%” – taking into account the fact that spherical powder pricing quoted in 2022 is typically in the $150/kg to $250/kg range.
The reduction of more than 75% remains a prospect expressed by Taso. The US$150–250/kg prices mentioned in the interview are historical indications, not current quotations or a like-for-like commercial comparison.
The next step one can expect from IperionX
Although its focus at the time is to deliver added value for the additive manufacturing market, it should be noted that IperionX can produce both spherical and angular powders. To re-shore the titanium supply chain, the company focuses its operations on the U.S. for now. For Taso, “the US needs to reduce its dependency on Russian and Chinese titanium. Making these processes more sustainable and low-cost is key to ensuring a better future for generations to come”.
“As we grow and continue to scale, we believe we have the potential to produce at a very competitive price point with the potential to capture market share from the aluminum and stainless-steel markets. [For now, we need to focus on the] re-emergence of domestic titanium supply chains – but created sustainably and at low cost”, Taso concludes.
This interview was first published in the September/October 2022 issue of 3D ADEPT Mag.
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