Titanium Vs Alloy

Introduction

Titanium alloy is a new metal, and it could be found abundantly in the earth’s crust, it is one of the essential metal that can be used in all industries especially in the aerospace and aircraft industry. Titanium alloys products in general are well known for it’s strength to weight ratio, the trend of using titanium alloy in aircraft increased when there is greater use of jet turbine engine, engine stator unit, and engine compressor unit and landing gears for the passenger aircraft whereas titanium alloys were widely used in aerospace industry of the Russian piloted spacecraft, Vostuk and Soyuz. (Moiseyev, 2005). The main advantages of titanium alloys in terms of it’s characteristics compared to other structural metals, such as the aluminium alloy is that titanium alloys have high strength and stiffness, good ductility, corrosion resistant and  is lower in density. This is because titanium has a closely packed crystals, called alpha which is in a hexagonal shape that transforms to beta which is a body centred cubic, at 1625 degrees Fahrenheit. There are there major classes of titanium alloy grades, which is the alpha alloys, that have medium to low strength, but have the best weldability among the three grades, and another grade which is the alpha-beta alloys that have higher strength but are less formable than alpha alloys, and the best of all, the beta alloys, that are medium to high strength, responds well to heat treatment and have a very good ductility among the three grades of titanium. (Titanium in aerospace , 1975)

The largest consumer of titanium alloy is the aerospace and aircraft industries, the material’s characteristics such as, strength, heat resistance, fatigue resistance, crack resistance and corrosion resistance is a requirement in the aerospace and aircraft industry. As for the processibility of titanium alloy, the plasticity in deformation, weldability and machinability plays a major role in manufacturing an aircraft items and components. The table below shows why titanium alloy is a preferred material to be used in aerospace and aircraft industry compared to aluminium alloys. (Moiseyev, 2005)