Abstract
Titanium and its alloys have been applied to motorcycles and automobiles in order to reduce the weight of their component parts. In recent years, titanium exhaust systems, engine valves and connecting rods have been widely applied mainly to sports type or large motorcycles. In addition to Ti-6Al-4V, Ti-Al-Fe alloys which utilize Fe as an inexpensive and a common alloying element are used for engine valves and connecting rods. In exhaust systems, such as mufflers, at first, Gr.2 commercially pure titanium sheets have been mainly used because of their high cold formability. Furthermore, several titanium alloys to which Cu, Al, Si and Nb are added have been actively developed in order to improve strength, creep properties, oxidation resistance and so on at elevated temperatures, as service temperature becomes higher. Also, due to the development of processing technologies, the same methods and processes that are used for manufacturing steel parts have been applied to titanium ones, and the application of titanium has recently been expanded to fracture-split connecting rods and fuel tanks. Newly, titanium foil has been adopted as a separator of PEFC used in fuel cell vehicles from the viewpoints of excellent corrosion resistance and cold formability. As mentioned above, in this presentation, the technical contents of titanium products and parts developed for motorcycles and automobiles are reviewed.
Highlights
IntroductionAutomobiles (cars), super sports motorcycles, and large commercial aircrafts are listed in ascending order of mass price, which is considered to be corresponding to the current advancement of multi-materialization
In terms of aircraft and high-end motorcycles, multi-materialization has been progressed, and for example, Boeing B787 and Airbus A 350 aircrafts are roughly composed of 50% of composite materials, 20% of aluminum, 15% of titanium, and 10% of steel in mass ratio, respectively
It is known that the stretchability of titanium is not considerably high in general, TP270C that has been applied to fuel tanks has stretchability comparable to that of low carbon steel usually used for press forming processes
Summary
Automobiles (cars), super sports motorcycles, and large commercial aircrafts are listed in ascending order of mass price, which is considered to be corresponding to the current advancement of multi-materialization. Since the strength of some aluminum alloys and magnesium alloys reduces significantly at temperatures of 100 to 200° C or higher, it can be said that titanium alloys are more advantageous In order for such excellent properties of titanium to be fully exhibited in the automotive field, various efforts and technological developments for reducing the production cost of parts have been made by automobile and parts manufacturers and material producers. The application technology of titanium and titanium alloy in recent years for fuel tanks, connecting rods, engine valves, exhaust system and fuel cell separators will
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