The road bike with 3D-printed titanium components that the CSIRO helped produce for Perth-based Flying Machine. Photo: CSIRO

Titanium has been used in jewellery and bicycles, 3D printing and heavy industrial parts, even in the cyborg exoskeleton in the 1987 film Robocop, now moves are afoot to establish a new refining process that could make Australia a titanium leader.

According to Australia's peak research organisation, the CSIRO, Australia has the biggest deposits of ilmenite and rutile titanium's base minerals - in the world. It extracts and refines the material, but doesn't process it in large quantities, missing out on a lucrative revenue stream.

Extracting and refining the mineral sand into the metallic form is labour intensive and wasteful, but titanium's strength-to-weight ratio, corrosion resistance and biocompatibility make it ideal for aerospace, medical and sport applications.

CSIRO's John Barnes would like to see Australia step up its role in titanium processing.

Currently 95 per cent of the mineral sand mined is used in an oxide form, the pure white colour crucial in products from paint to cosmetics.

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The small fraction that is converted to metal goes through a process that is mostly unchanged since the 1950s. It involves very environmentally unfriendly chemicals and as John Barnes, director of high performance metals at the CSIRO's manufacturing flagship explains, expensive.

"When you're machining away 90 per cent of what you want there's a bit of a perverse relationship."

"The industry average is about 11 to one [raw material versus finished product], so you're wasting well over 90 per cent of what you're buying and it goes back into a recycle stream that doesn't have enough value," Mr Barnes says.

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Australia could be a leader in titanium processing: CSIRO