Engineering Alloys (307) Lecture 7 Titanium Alloys I

David Dye

Department of Materials, Imperial College Royal School of Mines, Prince Consort Road, London SW7 2BP, UK +44 (207) 594-6811, david.dye@imperial.ac.uk
Imperial College London

Outline
Ti primary production CP Ti and applications -Ti alloying, alloy design near- alloy microstructures, forging and heat treatment / alloys, Ti-6Al-4V defects

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Ti Primary Production Kroll Process

Ti common in Earths crust Energy to separate ~125 MWhr/tonne (4/kg just in power) Batch process over 5 days:
Produce TiCl4 from TiO2 and Cl2 TiCl4 + 2 Mg 2 MgCl2 + Ti chip out Ti sponge (5-8t) from reactor cost 5/kg Chlorides corrosive, nasty

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World annual capacity ~100,000 t, demand ~60,000t ($500m - small) Need a cheaper process that is direct
FFC (Cambridge) and others

Subsequent Processing

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harvey fig p11

Casting

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Use skull melting (EBHCR) instead of VIM/VAR/ESR for final melting stage in triple melting process

Ti Allotropes, Phase Diagram

Pure Ti:
L (bcc) @ 1660 C (hcp) @ 883 C

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=4.7 g/cc highly protective TiO2 film Diffusion in 100x slower than in
origin of better creep resistance

Alloying: Pure alloys

stabilisers: O, Al (N,C) stabilisers: V,Mo,Nb,Si,Fe neutral: Sn, Zr Strengthen pure alloys by
solid solution O, Al, Sn Hall-Petch = 231 + 10.5 d cold work martensite reaction exists, of little benefit (not heat-treatable)

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harvey fig p13 Table of CP Ti

Uses: chiefly corrosion resistance

chemical plant heat exchangers cladding

Microstructures near alloys

stabilisers raise / transus stabilisers to widen / field and allow hot working heat treatable
~10% primary (grain boundary) during h.t. @ >900C oil quench intragranular plates + retained age at ~625C to form , spheroidise and stress relieve Then >>90%

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Lightly deformed (~5%) Ti-834

Properties near- alloys

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Refined grain size

stronger better fatigue resistance

Predominantly few good slip systems

good creep resistance

Si segregates to dislocation cores inhibit glide/climb further

Ti Creep Rates

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+ alloys: Microstructures
Contain significant stabilisers to enable to be retained to RT Classic Ti alloy: Ti-6Al-4V
>50% of all Ti used

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Classically
1065 C all forge @ 955C acicular on grain boundaries to inhibit coarsening Air cool produce lamellae colonies formed in prior grains (minimise strain), w/ in between (think pearlite)

Ti-6-4: heat treat

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Ti-6-4: properties
N.B. Must avoid Ti3Al formation
via Al equivalent: Al+0.33 Sn + 0.16 Zr + 10 (O+C+2N) < 9 wt%

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ppt hardening + grain size

Defects

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Major -related problem is the production of -rich regions due to oxygen (+N) embrittlement the entrapment of O-rich particles during melting Called case Also a problem in welding often Ti is welded in an Ar-filled cavity to avoid this

alloys suffer from -rich regions from solute segregation ( flecks), and/or from embrittling phase, a diffusionless way to transform from -bcc to a hexagonal phase.
more in lecture on alloys

Review: Titanium I (L7)

near- microstructure

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/ microstructure

-Ti Alloys

Casting

Phase Diagram