You can already buy a titanium bike (sourced from China) for a very reasonable place from Bikesdirect.com— mine was cheaper than a steel Surly Straggler for similar specs.
There's very little actual titanium in titanium bike frames. Most of the cost is in the machining and labor, so I doubt prices will drop much. And the majority of riders seem to prefer carbon fiber anyway.
>Most of the cost is in the machining and labor, so I doubt prices will drop much.
I'm not sure why that would be the case. Titanium alloys are only marginally more difficult to work with than aluminium alloys. The tubes are hydroformed and die cut, so the only difference is a touch more die wear. Titanium is a bit finicky to weld, but that can't possibly account for the ~500% price premium over aluminium frames. There's a tiny bit more surface preparation and your fixtures need to be more complex to provide adequate gas purging, but the differences in a mass production environment are quite marginal.
>And the majority of riders seem to prefer carbon fiber anyway.
Carbon is better for competition road bikes, because it offers the absolute lowest weight and can be easily formed into complex aerodynamic profiles. Entry-level bikes tend to be aluminium for cost reasons. For touring and audax bikes, many riders still prefer steel for durability and comfort. Titanium has the corrosion-resistance and light weight of aluminium but the comfort of steel, so it's considered by many to be the ideal material for non-racing bikes, but the cost is often prohibitive.
As far as I can see, the bike industry would be transformed if titanium were to achieve price parity with aluminium.
The point is that a modern titanium bike frame costs at least $1200 even though it contains <2kg of titanium, and high purity titanium only costs ~$50/kg. So I can't see how just cutting the cost of the raw material would have a transformative impact on the bike industry.
> Titanium is light, but my favorite thing is it is next to impossible to bend.
This gives an insane amount of tensile strenght since it always wants to retain its shape. TBH I have no idea why we haven't seen Titanium in things like golf clubs, hockey sticks, baseball bats, tennis rackets, snowboards etc, where you could really use its springy characteristics to a huge advantage.
I've always felt like it has a huge potential for widespread use in sports.
As far as I know, they are used quite heavily in golf and tennis equipment.
Hockey sticks tend to be carbon fiber.
<s>I think the baseball wood/aluminum debate can't handle another metal </s>
Snowboards and such do benefit from being able to bend. I could see it more in alpine snowboard equipment, but again, I'm not sure that carbon fiber wouldn't be the better bet.
> Even then some of the new composite materials out hit Ti
The issue is one PEOPLE DIE because of these bats and balls. (I'm old but I was one of maybe three people that could hit a home run now all 10 players can)
1) The other bats were so thin that you had to rotate the bat when you hit because the bats bend or will break. The ti bats are durable and you can still sue them. The issue is nothing really is better than ti but ti has a cost.
Since someone is doubting what I said here is SBNations take on Ti Bats.
>"The pitcher’s mound for amateur slow-pitch softball varies according to the field and age of players, but is generally between 40 and 50 feet from home. This means that after a ball is hit, assuming an exit velocity of between 78 and 102 mph, the pitcher has between 0.456 and 0.350 seconds to react to a batted ball. Adding exit velocity shaves precious micro-seconds off that time. That was what made titanium bats so dangerous. Softballs became missiles and pitchers became targets. And the dangers are real. Players have lost teeth, eyesight, motor function, IQ points and even their lives when struck by balls hit off hot bats."
Diamond-like carbon should be applied everywhere there's wear. It could allow drill bits, gears, bike chains, joints, etc to all last virtually forever.
I doubt it's happening already. Metalysis currently owns the patent rights to the process and is focusing on tantalum and zirconium (higher profit margins) while working on scaling it up.
Tantalum ore concentrate currently sells for over $150/kg. Making metallic tantalum powder from the oxide is barely interesting even if the FFC process works quite well. Tantalum would remain an expensive specialty metal. Titanium dioxide, OTOH, is closer to $150 per tonne. A cheap process to convert that inexpensive raw material to metal would be one of the most impressive advances in industrial metal production in decades.
There's an ugly licensing fight in the history of the FFC Cambridge process. See the section "Commercial challenges" in this article:
In 2000 Cambridge University Technical Service issued a sub-license for the technology that British Titanium Plc used for the purpose of producing bulk titanium and titanium alloys. BTi worked closely with researchers from the Fray group (one F of the Fray, Farthing, Chen inventors whose names make up "FFC.")
The US Office of Naval Research issued contracts to BTi for R&D work in 2000 and 2002. In 2002 DARPA started funding more expensive scale-up work also associated with BTi. In 2004 NASA issued an even larger contract to BTi. Cambridge spun off Metalysis in 2002 with another license, but Metalysis didn't seem to be making much progress compared with BTi. In 2005, CUTS revoked the sub-license granted to BTi and made all of the IP exclusive to Metalysis. The license revocation destroyed BTi.
My interpretation: CUTS crippled BTi because Metalysis wasn't making enough progress on implementation to compete against BTi. But CUTS really crippled the whole concept because the experts that had been working for and with BTi didn't want to work with Metalysis after getting screwed by CUTS. Metalysis "pivoted" to tantalum and has failed to make notable progress there, too. Maybe the application to titanium will finally resume progress toward industrialization after the patents expire.
I think pipes might be a strong contender. Currently titanium is roughly the same price as copper, but harder to machine -- and it's produced in ugly forms by the Kroll process. Electrolysis produces a metal powder using less energy. Titanium is practically immune to chloride corrosion but is slowly worn down by fluoride, although fluoride is typically present at just 1 PPM in tap water (anything higher is toxic) so Ti pipes should last quite a while. Boats can also be made of titanium alloys. Anything dealing with water gets easier when titanium is in play, for the most part; one of the few things that really affects it is lactate (biofouling), but even that can be inhibited with the right alloying additives. More speculative uses might include offshore wind turbines and underwater (isobaric) compressed-air energy storage equipment.
