LAUSR

Abstract A novel process to fabricate titanium metal by a molten salt electrochemical deoxidization method has attracted significant interest worldwide, in which TiO2 as the cathode is directly reduced to metal titanium. However, the titanium sub-oxide, Ti4O7, has never been used for obtaining titanium metal, although it offers some advantages over TiO2 especially high electric conductivity. In this study, Ti4O7 was employed to successfully fabricate the pure titanium metal for the first time through this process. The results showed that sponge-type titanium metal could be obtained after 23 h of electrochemical reduction at 900 °C. And the particles size slightly increased to ∼3–6 μm in diameter compared with Ti4O7 (2–5 μm) according to the scanning electron microscopy. The intermediate process with various reaction time was also studied, showing that there were some sequent intermediate products such as CaTiO3 and CaTi2O4 produced during the transition of Ti4O7 to Ti. This paper provides a fancy idea to realize the fabrication of titanium metal through a low-cost and relatively high-efficiency process.