How Potassium Titanate Can Be Produced From Potash
Potassium titanate is a stable chemical that offers high wear resistance even in very hot conditions. This makes it useful in areas like the automotive industry, welding, electrodes, and coatings.
However, establishing the material, which exists in powder form, is the end point of a process that involves a great deal more than just digging the stuff up from the ground, for potassium titanate is created through a reaction between potassium and titanium dioxide.
This material and its many modern applications may be particularly useful in the 21st century, but the potassium it is extracted from has had its own uses that date back centuries.
Potassium carbonate, also known as potash, is an easily accessible form of the mineral that acted as an alternative to sodium carbonate in the making of glass and bleaching of textiles. Potash was usually obtained from land plants and sodium from sea plants.
The presence of potassium in plants should come as no surprise, as it is present in high quantities in foods like bananas.
Eventually, potassium came to be of greater importance as unlike sodium carbonate, it could be used in making gunpowder. Initially, it could be obtained in large quantities from wood, but this involved major deforestation until the 1860s, when the first mineral deposits were found in Germany.
Later, as two world wars made reliance on Germany impossible, the US and other countries found their own deposits, although the UK did not have its own potash mine until the 1970s, when the Boulby Mine in North Yorkshire began production. At one time this one mine accounted for half the potash in the UK.
While potash continues to be useful as a fertiliser and in soap making, among other purposes, its potassium compounds mean it can find a much more high-tech utility when combined with titanium dioxide.
