Titanium alloy has always been known for high specific strength and excellent corrosion resistance. Scientists at the university of California, Berkeley, have found that titanium alloys become brittle when they contain slightly more oxygen. The discovery could lead to wider and more economical applications for titanium alloys in cars, buildings and Bridges. The findings appear in the Feb. 6 issue of the journal Science.
This discovery opens up a whole new prospect for the practical and efficient application of titanium alloys. Titanium, a silver-gray metal, is widely used in many fields due to its superior properties, such as high-end bicycles, laptop computers and human transplants. However, titanium alloys with low oxygen content are difficult to obtain, and the high purification cost greatly hindering their application in the construction, automobile and aircraft industries.
"If you can come to and processing aluminum metal as the cost of machining titanium alloy, at the same time also can guarantee the performance of titanium alloy, titanium alloy will soon can be widely applied to automobiles, trucks, aircraft and ships," one of the authors of this article, from the Lawrence Berkeley national laboratory, associate professor, department of materials science and engineering of Andrew Minor said, "the excellent corrosion resistance of titanium alloy and its unique performance for industrial application is very attractive, so reduce the processing cost is bound to do."
Andrew Minor leads a team of researchers in the department of materials science and engineering that is working to solve a long-standing problem in the field of alloys: how oxygen content can lead to dramatic changes in the properties of metals.
