Decarbonized Titanium Recovery from Aluminium and Titanium Production Residues

Project Information

EURO-TITAN

Grant agreement ID: 101135077

DOI

10.3030/101135077

EC signature date 7 December 2023

Start date 1 January 2024

End date 31 December 2027

Funded under

• Digital, Industry and Space

Total cost

No data

EU contribution

€ 4 999 995,07

Coordinated by

TECHNISCHE UNIVERSITAT CLAUSTHAL
Germany

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - EURO-TITAN (Decarbonized Titanium Recovery from Aluminium and Titanium Production Residues)

Reporting period: 2024-01-01 to 2025-06-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

EURO-TITAN will be a pioneer in unlocking continuous Ti resources from metallurgical waste streams from alumina and Ti-dioxide production, creating the roadmap for producing 54 ktpy of Ti metal upon full industrialization. Europe can become totally independent from Russian Ti-metal sponges imports, which are crucial for all transport and medical sectors. The industrially driven consortium experienced from previous and ongoing projects for metals extraction from industrial wastes (H2020, Scale, EIT Scavanger, Scale Up, Valore) will develop a > 90% lower CO2 emission Ti-metal extraction process compared to the conventional Kroll process which emits 10 tn CO2 per tn of Ti metal. Our innovative technology will be a green hydrogen sourced1 direct Ti reduction process which will be scaled to demonstration in the industrially relevant environment (TRL5) at the Alumina-Doo plant and at ORANO (France) to produce tailor-made Ti-metal products for ingots or alloying. Our Ti-metal price will be 15 % lower compared to imports (rough estimate 6800 €/t Ti-metal compared to current prices from Russia and China at 8500 €/t). Process optimization will be achieved through integration of in-line- real time data monitoring, establishing repository of high-quality and trusted datasets embedding Artificial Intelligence. We expect a min of 20 % reduction of on-site energy and water consumption, while simultaneously minimizing production interruption. Circularity is ensured, as the remaining residues are converted into innovative (30 % lower CO2 emissions compared to cement based) construction materials while water will be recycled, and excess heat energy will serve local households.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The first period of the Euro-Titan Project spans from M1 (January 2024) to M18 (June 2025). During this period, no significant delays were observed and the work on the work packages has been performed is summarized below:
All research activities are successfully initiated in all active work packages and harmonious coordination was achieved.
The laboratory scale investigations are initiated and positive results on the technical development is achieved. Specifically;
o The feed material from all sources, bauxite residue from ALU and titanium pigment production residue from VEN, had been successfully delivered to the processing partners.
o Hydrogen based reduction process, which is the initial step of the complicated process chain was initiated and positive results were obtained by BAM and RWTH.
o LIBS system was developed for in-situ measurements and calibrated accordingly to be utilized in the high temperature processing by LTB.
o Physical processing route to up-concentrate the Ti bearing minerals had been investigated for both sources, and strategies are developed by TUC which was further utilized for the investigation of hydrometallurgical processing by TUC, RWTH, MEAB and ORANO.
o Cloud based data management platform had been set-up and started operation for harmonized and continuous data collection by SAISLAB.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

There are multiple approaches successfully achieved duting the first period of the EURO-TITAN project:
- The preliminary investigations on the low emission hydrogen-based reduction process to recover Ti minerals from complicated residues is initiated. Various techniques are tested for the successful separation of iron.
- The slag fraction which contains the majority of the titanium was further treated with physical and physico-chemical techniques to up-concentrate the titanium bearing phases further for decreased chemical consumption in the following processes. Additionally, direct physical processing of titanium dioxide pigment residues resulted in decreased silica content while concentrated titanium-bearing phases by the utilizatioin of gravitational separation methids.
- Investigations on conventional and intensified hydrometallurgical processes are initiated with the intention of designing processes with supressed silica gel formation and reaching high purity titanium precursors for metallic titanium production. High titanium leaching values are obtained. During the further purification step, ammonium titanium flouride product is produced as a result of solvent extraction which is an important and high value product for titanium industry.
- The first step of successful AI integration, model preparation and the data collection platform is successfully set-up and went online. The major parameters for each process are determined via online data collection from various scientific articles and available patents. These parameters were started to be collected by each technical partner and implemented into the cloud based big data platform.

Euro-Titan Summary