The raw materials for making titanium iron include titanium iron concentrate (Fe-TiO3), rutile (TiO2), titanium dioxide (TiO2) and waste titanium metal materials (Ti, Ti-V-Al, etc.). You need to reduce all of these with reducing agents to get titanium iron and titanium alloys, except for waste titanium metal materials.TiO2 is quite a difficult oxide to reduce. You can reduce TiO2 with carbon, but only at high temperatures, and you'll end up with TiC instead of Ti. You can get high carbon titanium iron this way. You can't reduce TiO2 with silicon, but adding CaO as a flux can get the silicon reduction reaction going. Titanium and silicon form stable silicides, which are good for silicon reduction reactions, but the titanium iron you get has a lot of silicon in it.You can reduce TiO2 with aluminium to make Ti.

But if there's less aluminium than predicted, you'll end up with loads of TiO2.TiO2 is more stable than TiO2 and you can't reduce it, even with aluminium.It's a strong alkaline oxide that can form slag with Al2O3 or SiO2, so you need to add CaO to stop the slag formation reaction of TiO2, and it's good for reducing TiO2 too. If you compare the reaction in Figure 2, you'll see that it's easier to reduce ilmenite (FeTiO3) with aluminium than to reduce TiO2, and adding CaO has the same effect. So reducing titanium concentrate with aluminium is the main method for producing titanium iron, and the product has low carbon content but higher aluminium and silicon content. So, the main ways to make titanium iron are the aluminothermal, electrosilicothermal and electrocarbothermal methods, as well as re-melting waste titanium metal.