James,
Bob Gordon is indeed correct, that there was a blast furnace operation
attempting to smelt titaniferous ores at Tahawus, but the operation
could not really be considered successful, in that it went bankrupt in
very short order. Tahawus is also interesting because it adapted to a
mineral-fuel (anthracite coal) technology very early (1840s). Howoever,
it failed because they did not realize their ore source had such a high
percentage of Ti-- the company thought they were smelting magnetite--
they did make iron, but I doubt the quality was terribly good, and they
sat about wondering why they couldn't produce good quality-metal. They
did indeed use hot blast there.
I doubt that a cold-blast charcoal-fired furnace could acheive
temperatures to smelt titaniferous ore. A bloomery simply could not.
Bloomeries operated by simply reducing iron from the ore; in a bloomery
reaction, the iron itself never melts, but separates itself from the
slag to form a bloom at the bottom of the firebox. A bloomery fire hot
enough to reduce Ti from the gangue would probably melt the iron, and
likely carbonize it to a point beyond steel-- commercially worthless.
This about exhusts my knowledge of titaniferous smelting-- I just know a
bloomery or a cold-blast furnace couldn't do it. I do know that that
Republic Steel evetually mined the Tahawus lode (by the 20th centry, we
did have the technology and smelting techniques to deal with the Ti in
the ore), and sold the titantium to a paint company during WWII. No
mines in the Adrirondack range are being worked, but the Tahawus lode
remains to this day one of the largest deposits of Ti in the country...
the veins just run too deep.
Hope this helps.
Jason Menard
Interdisciplinary Archaeological Studies
Teaching Assistant- General College Writing Program
University of Minnesota
[log in to unmask]
James H Brothers IV wrote:
>
> I'm doing research on the Colonial Iron Industry of Virginia. One furnace,
> Albemarle, may have failed due to titanium in its ore. The furnace was
> established in 1771 and was out of business by 1779. Analysis of some of the
> local ores in 1880/82 revealed the ore had 6.53% titanium dioxide.
>
> According to Dr. Bob Gordon at Yale, titanium increases the melting
> temperature of the slag. So that a furnace has to be run hotter. He knows of
> at least one furnace in the US, Tahawus in New York, that successfully worked
> a titanium rich magnetite. I suspect given the date (1850s) that it was hot
> blast. Can a cold blast charcoal furnace achieve the required temperatures?
> How about a bloomery?
>
> Does anyone have any experience with working titanium ores or empirical data
> on the effects?
>
> Thanks
> JH (Jamie) Brothers IV
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