rutile

The primary ingredient in housepaint is rutile titanium dioxide particles, which have a very high refractive index.

Ilmenite and rutile come from mines, and then is industrially processed to isolate the titanium.

They were importing ore, specifically rutile, which is what TiO2 pigment is made from.

Plus, titanium dioxide is used as a pigment, which would have reasonably explained a great deal of the rutile ore they purchased.

Or you better hope the war didn't kill all the people who do know the location of, say rutile and ilmenite deposits.

When heavy mineral sands are processed to extract the Ti and Zr ( from rutile, illmenite, zircon), the residual concentrate is rich in monazite.

Iluka (Aus) has a mineral sands stockpile from their zircon/rutile processing, and are constructing a refinery next to the heap to process the rare earth minerals.

Talc, mullite, fiberglass, and bentonite come to mind as candidate reinforcing fillers, and rutile microcrystals can also be grown in an acicular morphology.

Ilmenite is named after the Ilmenski mountains in Russia where the mineral was first discovered in relatively free abundance, the other principle source for titanium is rutile sands..

Higher RI than diamond but less than rutile.

I don't see how the square-cube law plays into it; the reason they're supporting the catalyst on rutile (anatase?) instead of just using solid bars of metal alloy is precisely to ensure neat linear scaling, and the reason it's 1% metal instead of 0.1% or 0.001% is that the rutile is in the form of 1–100 nm particles.

Here, we demonstrate an efficient core/shell photoanode with a highly active oxygen evolution electrocatalyst shell (FeMnP) and semiconductor core (rutile TiO2) for photoelectrochemical oxygen evolution reaction.

But the article says that the US lacked the ore: “Back when they were building the airplane the United States didn’t have the ore supplies – an ore called rutile ore.

Rutile is used in refractory bricks and the import was of the ore mineral.