Titanium Sponge Plant of

India India, officially the Republic of India ( Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the ...

is located at Kerala Minerals and Metals Ltd ( KMML), Chavara,

Kollam Kollam (), also known by its former name Quilon , is an ancient seaport and city on the Malabar Coast of India bordering the Laccadive Sea, which is a part of the Arabian Sea. It is north of the state capital Thiruvananthapuram. The ci ...

district of

Kerala Kerala ( ; ) is a state on the Malabar Coast of India. It was formed on 1 November 1956, following the passage of the States Reorganisation Act, by combining Malayalam-speaking regions of the erstwhile regions of Cochin, Malabar, South C ...

. Titanium sponge plant is a

manufacturing plant A factory, manufacturing plant or a production plant is an industrial facility, often a complex consisting of several buildings filled with machinery, where workers manufacture items or operate machines which process each item into another. The ...

which produces

titanium sponge Titanium is a chemical element with the symbol Ti and atomic number 22. Found in nature only as an oxide, it can be reduced to produce a lustrous transition metal with a silver color, low density, and high strength, resistant to corrosion in ...

, a material which has very useful applications in space programme and other strategic areas like aeronautics, light defence vehicles etc. The plant in India is the only one in the world which can undertake all the different activities of manufacturing aerospace grade titanium sponge under one roof. The material is an alloy product which is produced through

Kroll process The Kroll process is a pyrometallurgical industrial process used to produce metallic titanium from titanium tetrachloride. The Kroll process replaced the Hunter process for almost all commercial production. Process In the Kroll process, the Ti ...

which includes leaching or heated vacuum distillation to make the metal almost 99.7% pure.

History

The importance of establishing the Titanium Sponge Plant was realised keeping in view of the country's huge demand and import of titanium and magnesium alloys from countries like China, Russia and Japan. Former President of India and scientist, Dr

APJ Abdul Kalam Avul Pakir Jainulabdeen Abdul Kalam (; 15 October 193127 July 2015) was an Indian aerospace scientist and statesman who served as the 11th President of India from 2002 to 2007. He was born and raised in Rameswaram, Tamil Nadu and studied phy ...

highlighted about it in one of his speech at Kerala Legislative Assembly. The plant was fully commissioned in August 2015.

Establishment

The successful implementation has only been achieved after about twenty years of continuous research by the Defence Metallurgical Research Laboratory ( DMRL under

DRDO The Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) ( IAST: ''Raksā Anūsandhān Evam Vikās Sangaṭhan'') is the premier agency under the Department of Defence Research and Development in Ministry of Defence of the Government of India ...

). The project is funded by Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (

VSSC The Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC) is a major space research centre of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), focusing on rocket and space vehicles for India's satellite programme. It is located in Thiruvananthapuram, in the India ...

under

ISRO The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO; ) is the national space agency of India, headquartered in Bengaluru. It operates under the Department of Space (DOS) which is directly overseen by the Prime Minister of India, while the Chairman of ...

Ranking

India is the seventh country in the world to have such a complex structured TSP which has the technology to make titanium sponge and the first to have done all the process under one roof in indigenous manner. The company, Kerala Minerals and Metals Ltd. (KMML), has also won awards for commercialising the technology.

Design and capacity

The plant has an intricate design to carry out realisation of Titanium alloy wrought products and fabrication of hardware. Work is being done actively to increase the capacity of the TSP for the proposed 10000 TPY. A memorandum of understanding has also been signed by the KMML with

Steel Authority of India Steel Authority of India Limited (SAIL) is a central public sector undertaking based in New Delhi, India. It is under the ownership of Ministry of Steel, Government of India with an annual turnover of INR 1,03,480 Crore (US$13 billion) for fis ...

(SAIL) for a huge joint venture for preparing titanium sponge at large scale. India has the third largest reserves of Titanium containing minerals. India was also the sixth largest country by Titanium product in 2013. However, the high purity Titanium sponge(which has at least 99.7% Titanium) as raw material is still imported for aerospace applications from countries like Japan, Russia and China.

realized the aerospace-grade alloy, having formula Ti₆Al₄V, at Mishra Dhatu Nigam (Midhani) in Hyderabad.

Future prospects

The proposals for future include magnesium recovery from MgCl₂ (

magnesium chloride Magnesium chloride is the family of inorganic compounds with the formula , where x can range from 0 to 12. These salts are colorless or white solids that are highly soluble in water. These compounds and their solutions, both of which occur in nat ...

) to set up an additional facility on similar lines. Proposals are also there to expand the capacity which is presently 500 MT to 1000 MT.

Applications

The material produced by the plant is useful for liquid propellant tanks for launch vehicles, inter tank structures, gas bottle/liners and interface rings for satellites.

References

{{reflist Manufacturing plants Physics experiments Titanium Aerospace materials