Titanium metal manufacturing and document management are extremely important in the production process.
While not as hard as some varieties of heat-treated steel, titanium is comparatively very strong for its weight, which is somewhere between stainless steel and aluminum.
Its high tensile strength-to-density ratio makes it the perfect material for the manufacture of fighter jets, high-stress turbines, and more. However, titanium is also quite expensive to produce and contrary to popular thinking, it isn’t because titanium is rare—in fact, titanium is the fourth most common mineral found in the earth, making up about .62% of the earth’s crust.
What makes titanium so expensive to produce is a combination of two factors: it can be difficult to isolate and is expensive to refine. This is actually a byproduct of its durability—since titanium has a very stable crystalline structure, it has a very high melting point, which makes purifying it costly and time consuming.
However, some of these factors are about to change: modern mining techniques are quickly overcoming the challenges of mining titanium and, due to some important advancements in titanium refinement that we will talk about later in this article, producing it is going to quickly become a lot cheaper. This means that titanium production is about to see a major upswing in the next couple years.
Consequently, metal manufacturers are going to need some serious information management infrastructure. Document Management Systems (DMSs) are becoming an increasingly vital part of any enterprise, and the production of titanium and other metal is no different
. In this article, we’re going to talk about what has happened in the titanium industry that has caused a potential increase in its activity and how information management for titanium production can be vastly improved by implementing a DMS like that available from eFileCabinet.
Revolution in Titanium Manufacturing
For a long time, plasma has been refined using the Kroll process. This involves taking metal ore containing titanium and heating it to temperatures of over one thousand degrees Celsius while treating it with volatile chlorides like chlorine gas and liquid magnesium.
Because this process involves a number of expensive reagents, high energy requirements, and numerous steps, it is quite expensive and time consuming to perform.
A new process, however, is becoming much more common. This process involves using plasma arcs to split the titanium chloride bonds, producing a titanium vapor which then cools into a titanium powder.
Not only does this use less energy, the titanium powder produced is a lot more versatile in terms of re-shaping than the ingots produced by the Kroll process.
The Need for Smart Information Management in Titanium Metal Manufacturing and Document Management
People experienced in the metalworking field know that there’s a lot more documentation to it than people might think—documentation is required for just about every step of the smelting and refinement processes.
If anything goes wrong in those steps, it is very important that the proper documentation is readily available in order to establish what happened and what can be done to fix the situation.
The Benefits of Information Management in Metal Manufacturing
Metal manufacturers, like any other business, can benefit from going paperless in their documentation. In addition to the environmental benefits of decreasing paper use, transitioning to paperless cuts costs and frees staff and management to work from anywhere, at any time.
How eFileCabinet Can Offer the Solution
Fortunately, there are DMS options out there that are catered directly to metalworking businesses. eFileCabinet offers a great service that is specifically geared toward businesses like metal manufacturers.
We understand that every business and every sector of industry has very different requirements for what they need. eFileCabinet’s DMS provides a flexible information management solution that allows businesses to easily store, organize, track, search, and share all file types securely. To learn more about eFileCabinet’s titanium metal manufacturing software, chat with a representative today.