When used in chemical process, Titanium Reactors have been found to be very cost-effective methods of resisting damaging corrosion. The following information is provided as background on Titanium, the alloy characteristics, its strengths and how a Titanium Reactor could be the answer to eliminating corrosion in your application.
Life Cycle Benefits of Titanium Reactors
A Titanium Reactor is highly cost-effective over the entire life cycle of the equipment. Properly maintained, TITAN’s Titanium Reactors can operate for decades, making Titanium an economical choice over other available reactive metals.
Titanium Reactors can:
- Deliver many years of economical service life
- Eliminate expensive downtime due to equipment failure
- Provide outstanding Corrosion Resistance
- Accommodate high steam pressure
- Remove possibilities of process fluid leaks
These qualities have led to acceptance and growth of the use of Tantalum in Reactors, Pressure Vessels, Columns, Storage Tanks as well as Heat Exchangers, Pipe and Piping Systems in sulfuric acid processing, production of urea and other fertilizers.
Titanium the Metal
Titanium is one of several metals which fall into the category of Reactive Metals or Corrosion Resistant Alloys, also known to industry as CRAs.
Reducing or oxidizing environments, with or without chlorides, and temperatures up to 1200ºF, are all possible with the CRA group of materials. In addition to high resistance to uniform corrosion attack, Corrosion Resistant Alloys can be very resilient to pitting, crevice and stress corrosion.
Titanium is often used as a material of construction for processing equipment in chemical, petrochemical, oil & gas and other industrial manufacturing environments. Within these applications, aggressive fluids, often at very high temperature, come into contact with the processing equipment surfaces, testing the strength and corrosion resistance of the material.
Considered the workhorse of the reactive metals, Titanium is readily available and goes into corrosion resistant fabrication more often than all of the other reactive metals combined.
Titanium Reactor Designs
TITAN’s Titanium Reactors are fabricated in many different types with a variety of features and adaptations to suit the customer’s requirements.
Designs and accessories to Titanium Reactors often include:
- Solid wall
- Explosive clad
- Standard jacket
- Half pipe jacket
- Outlet valves
- Dip tubes
TITAN designs and custom fabricates many different styles of Titanium Reactors in accordance with all major international design standards and pressure vessel codes.
Thermal designs use HTRI and AspenTech.
Manufacturing capacities include widths up to 120″ diameter, 300’ in length and weights up to 200 tons.
Contact us if you have any corrosion questions, require preliminary design or information on project budget costing.
Titanium Corrosion Resistance
Titanium Reactors are very often specified for highly-corrosive industrial applications and are frequently used in processes in which chlorides are a component.
Salts, acids and other chemicals are seriously corrosive and damaging to lesser materials than Titanium. This can rapidly lead to repair and/or replacement of the equipment in short time frame, causing expensive and highly disruptive process downtime.
Some of the common service applications of Titanium Reactors include:
- Chlorine Chemicals
- Hydrochloric Acid
- Phosphoric Acid
- Sea Water
- Sulfuric Acid
- Nitric Acid
TITAN Titanium Reactors are used in a wide variety of oxidizing and reducing environments. To view a list of process materials where Titanium is commonly used, please visit Applications of Titanium.
For a general guide on corrosion resistance, temperatures and concentrations please see TITAN’s publication, “Corrosion Resistance of Metals in Various Chemical Media” for additional information.*
*Note: Final selection of material must be based on actual evaluation of the metal in the corrosive medium.
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