Metalysis has secured nearly €1 million in European Space Agency funding to scale a more sustainable route to titanium production, with TTP joining a UK and EU consortium working to move the company’s patented FFC process from batch operation towards continuous or quasi-continuous manufacture.
The 24-month programme brings together Metalysis, Lucideon, TTP, NCHG and RHP-Technology to address a strategic manufacturing problem: how to produce titanium at industrial scale with lower energy use, lower environmental impact and greater supply chain resilience for Western markets. That challenge has become more acute as titanium supply has grown more concentrated and more exposed to geopolitical risk.
Titanium remains indispensable in space, aerospace and defence because of its high strength-to-weight ratio, corrosion resistance and performance at elevated temperatures. But conventional production is costly, energy intensive and environmentally difficult to justify at scale. The Kroll process relies on multiple stages of conversion and downstream processing, driving both cost and carbon intensity.
Metalysis’ FFC process offers an alternative electrochemical route. Using molten salt electrolysis, it directly reduces metal oxides and enables titanium and titanium alloy production in the solid state, avoiding several melting and thermomechanical steps required in conventional processing. The goal of the consortium is to preserve those advantages while scaling the technology beyond its current batch-based configuration.
TTP’s role is to provide modelling-led process and pilot plant design support to de-risk that transition. In practice, this means combining advanced modelling with pilot-scale data to understand process behaviour, identify scale-dependent constraints and support the design of a robust continuous manufacturing system.
That matters because electrochemical manufacturing systems do not succeed on chemistry alone. Their viability depends on how well the wider process is engineered, including reactor architecture, heat and mass transfer, current distribution, balance of plant, instrumentation and control. These are the factors that determine whether a promising electrochemical process can deliver stable, repeatable industrial throughput.
This systems-level challenge is central to TTP’s work in industrial electrochemistry and is explored further in our article Why electrochemical systems are hard, and how to build them. The project also sits within a broader shift in critical materials processing, where unconventional production routes are becoming increasingly important to resilience, sustainability and long-term competitiveness, as discussed in this article Why unconventionals are the future for critical minerals.
If successful, the programme will help establish a more scalable and economically viable route to titanium production in the UK and Europe. For sectors where material performance, production efficiency and supply security all matter, that would be a meaningful step forward.
Read the full press release on the Metalysis website.
