Titanium for Non-Aerospace Applications

Abstract

The titanium industry has been on quite a ride over the past 5 years. In 2007, a boom in sponge and primary metal production capacity was fueled by the prospects of continued strong economic growth. Airframe production and global industrial expansion drove this recovery and growth after the very hard post-9/11 years. Then the global economic crisis hit in 2008 with its well-known effects on most every industrial sector. The titanium industry was particularly rocked by this crisis as the timing coincided with delays in the introduction of new airframe programs that had been eagerly anticipated for some time. These new products promised to revolutionize the industry that is so key to titanium producer’s businesses. Unfortunately, the downturn hit at just the time a large amount of new sponge capacity was due to come on line. Orders, deliveries, and inventories went into a slide. Even with a worldwide recovery still on shaky ground, the huge spike in airframe production, both legacy and new design, has turned things around in a hurry. Significantly, major industrial construction projects are also helping to add to the bright times ahead for titanium. In this issue, we take a look at areas other than the traditional aerospace applications that could provide major markets in the future to help add new dimensions and depth to the world titanium story. Everyone can agree that if titanium is going to reach its potential in the future, it will be because innovative processing in both primary metal production and product development drive a major reduction in the final cost of useful articles. Thankfully, while the worldwide titanium business has been restive at best over the last few years, researchers have been hard at work around the globe looking at the entire titanium value chain and working constantly toward the goals that have seemed to be so close yet so far away for decades. The articles that follow provide a glimpse of how innovative thinking in diverse areas like steelmaking, biomaterials, and transportation/industrial use might be used in innovative ways. Sachdev et al. present a well-developed overview of past and present use of titanium in automotive applications, and they trace the processing routes both current and emerging that could be used to meet the cost challenges that restrict the use of the metal in that market. This article is significant in that it not only details the places that titanium has been successful in automobiles in the past, but also it examines the use of new routes to break down barriers that currently exist to high-volume use of titanium. Peter et al. report on the development of titanium sheet processing from powder precursors. The article shows how the use of roll compaction and various postprocessing routes holds the potential for making affordable titanium sheet that could potentially enter the industrial and transportation markets in high volumes. Affordable powder processing has long been known as a viable route to making titanium products, and this report shows that a pathway exists to making mill products meeting commercial material specifications. Cojocaru et al. show that ultra-fine microstructures and strong texture intensities can be produced in Ti-25Ta-25Nb alloy using an accumulative rollbonding technique with stacked sheets. This severe plastic deformation process, combined with other thermo-mechanical treatments, can produce materials with high anisotropy for use in biomedical implant applications. Ferrotitanium is an important deoxidizing and alloying addition to modern micro-alloyed steels that are key to reducing vehicle weight in steel body and suspension structures. Jayashree Mohanty from the Raman College of Engineering reports on experiments carried out to validate the production of ferrotitanium using electrolytic reduction processing directly from titania slag. On a final personal note, this will be the last issue of JOM for which I will act as the advisor to the JOM, Vol. 64, No. 5, 2012