With the continuous progress of science and technology, especially the vigorous development of aerospace and other high-end fields, the demand for titanium materials has risen sharply, thus greatly promoting the rapid expansion of China's titanium industry. However, this process is also accompanied by the generation of a large number of titanium residues and scrap. Due to the complexity of the processing characteristics of titanium and its alloys, resulting in a relatively low yield of titanium materials, usually only about 50%, and after further processing into parts, its yield is down to 10-20%. Therefore, how to effectively recycle these titanium residues and scraps has become an important issue to save resources and reduce production costs.
Titanium scrap comes from a wide range of sources, including the side skin materials and other external products that cannot meet the quality standard due to the contamination of iron, chlorine, oxygen, nitrogen and other impurities during the production of titanium sponge, the wastes generated from titanium ingots, as well as the edges and corners, titanium shavings, and used titanium products generated during the processing of finished materials and production of titanium products.
For different types of titanium scrap, we have explored diversified ways of utilisation:
(1) Uncontaminated residual titanium, such as processed edge remnants and titanium scraps, are of high quality and can be prioritised as additives for melting iron ingots and blended into titanium sponge to be extruded into titanium blocks for use.
(2) For lumps of waste titanium sponge, waste titanium head and waste titanium trimmings, we will utilise them separately according to their purity and composition. They can be used as alloy additives in the ferro-titanium industry or as important raw materials for the production of titanium powder.
(3) Equivalent external titanium powder has a variety of uses, can be used as a pyrotechnic industry in the explosive agent, but also as the production of aluminium processing industry in the additive or powder metallurgy of titanium products raw materials.
(4) As for the titanium chips and waste titanium blocks with more impurities, we convert them into high titanium iron by processing means, so as to achieve the maximum use of resources.
