One place where you’ll find our refractory materials, such as potassium titanate, is in the lining of furnaces and kilns, where their high heat resistance means that they can be heated to extreme temperatures and remain in a stable form.
This is important for the likes of producing molten metal for reshaping, such as in production of coins for currency. This week, with the introduction of a new pound coin, one reporter went behind the scenes of the coin production for BT Home.
Coin production starts by creating blanks – melting the metal in a huge furnace and removing it as a continuous strip. This is then rolled out to a thinner thickness, before being punched from the strip into blanks.
The blanks are reheated to 950 degrees celsius, before being being digitally engraved to the right size.
The coins are then struck with the force of 60 tonnes to emboss the design into them.
The Royal Mint also confirmed that the new one pound coin is one of the most secure in the world, with a hidden chemical material encased inside, which can be detected by a scanner as well as the new bimetallic design. It also has harder-to-fake milled edges.
It’s believed at present that as many as one in 30 of the older pound coins in circulation are fakes. When these are removed from circulation, they will be melted down and remade into new currency, while the new coin will be in circulation for the next 20 to 30 years.