KOLLAM: The Kerala Minerals and Metals Ltd (KMML) Chavara, the biggest public sector company in the state, will celebrate the silver jubilee of starting production in December. KMML is the only company in the world having the facilities for conducting the process from mining to metal production in the same complex.
It was William Gregor, who was a pastor and amateur geologist in Cornwall, England, who discovered the titanium element in 1791. He recognised the presence of a new element in ilmenite when he found black sand by a stream in the nearby parish of Manaccan and noticed that the sand was attracted by a magnet. He named it as Manaccanite. Martin Heinrich Klaporth, a German scientist confirmed his findings in 1795. The German scientists renamed the metallic chemical element as Titanium after Titan, the son of Sun god in the Greek epics. Titanium of very high purity was made in small quantities when Anton Eduard Van Arkel and Jan Hendrik de Boer discovered the iodide or crystal bar process in 1925, by reacting with iodine and decomposing the formed vapours over a hot filament to pure metal.
Titanium is a metal free from all toxic elements. It is because of this it is widely used in artificial organs implanting in the human body like cardiac pacemaker. The natural sources of titanium are limenite and mineral rutile.
It is estimated that the Chavara coast has deposits of about 1772 MT ilmenite and 255 MT mineral rutile. In 1909, German scientist Dr Shomberg had found the presence of monazite in the sand appeared on the coir products exported from Chavara coast. He continued the research and found the presence of other oxides such as ilmenite, zircon and rutile. The first business venture was started by Shomberg who started a sand company at Manavalakurichi in Chavara in 1910. Later another German Berg started a small business establishment at Neendakara.
The Germans lost their interest in the business following the arrest of Berg during the First World War on charges espionage for the German government.
Some others also ventured in to the mineral industry as monazite was widely used for the production of mantles for the gas mantle lantern.
However, there was a fall in the export of monazite to the Western countries following the use of electricity became widespread there. Then the industrialists turned to the export of ilmenite.
It was in 1922, ilmenite was exported from Chavara for the first time.