Direct preparation of titanium alloys from Ti-bearing blast furnace slag

Vanadium-titanium magnetite (VTM) is one of the important titanium ore. Now, it is mainly extracted by the steel-oriented traditional blast furnace technology and a lot of Ti-bearing blast furnace slag (TiO₂ > 20 wt%) is discharged and abandoned annually, which not only results in the environment pollution but also causes the waste of titanium resource. In this work, a new electrolysis process in molten Ti-bearing blast furnace slag with liquid iron cathode was proposed for liquid titanium alloys recovery from the Ti-bearing blast furnace slag. The results indicate that the depolarization effect by using liquid iron cathode results in the low deposition potential of about 2.0 V and high current efficiency of 69.82%. It further shows that the titanium can be extracted from the slag by increasing the electrolysis time or cell voltage although the deposition of the silicon is occurred more easily than that of the titanium based on thermodynamic data.