What's titanium worth to you?

Discussion in 'Materials' started by Stumble, Nov 24, 2012.

  1. Frosty

    Frosty Previous Member

    Your absolutely right there I have no experience with it so I don't like it ---spot on.
     
  2. upchurchmr
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    upchurchmr Senior Member

    Trust me, you would love it if it was cheaper. But it takes getting use to when machining etc. I get called a dinosaur periodically so don't take it too hard, if you actually care.
     
  3. Frosty

    Frosty Previous Member


    Sure I do---little bit.

    Can you arc weld this stuff.
     
  4. upchurchmr
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    upchurchmr Senior Member

    Frosty,

    Yes you can, but it needs an inert gas bath.
    I talked to a manufacturer of turbine disks and he said they teach a mechanic to do repairs in a day. He said it was the easiest thing to weld he ever tried.

    Not done it my self.
     
  5. Stumble
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    Stumble Senior Member

    From what our machinists tell me it is pretty easy to weld. But to maintain strength it has to be fully shielded from oxygen while it is still hot. The easiest way is to put the parts in a box and fill the box with argon (this is what we do on the shop floor). Second option is to shield the front and back of the weld with argon, this is not prefered, but very doable for parts that cant be boxed.

    And it isn't the same strength as aluminium, it's more like 16 times the strength of aluminium (6061 alum vs G5 titanium yield strength).
     
  6. upchurchmr
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    upchurchmr Senior Member

    Stumble,

    Have you ever heard of "Third Wave Systems" software?
    It is a software which evaluates your NC machining tape and suggests changes in feeds and speeds to achieve increases in overall machining time. Test I know of with an aerospace part already in production yielded 25% decrease in machining time.

    Might help you reduce the cost of your parts. Applicable to milling, turning, and drilling (i'm told).
    Hope I have not mentioned this before.
     
  7. Stumble
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    Stumble Senior Member

    Upchurch,

    I couldn't speak to what our production guys do, but I will certainly pass it up the chain to them. I know our entire production chain is computer optimized to reduce production costs, and the new factory we are building was optimized from the design stage to reduce machining time.

    From the sales side of things, anything we can do to get the price down, and production speed up is a win in my book. This works both sides of the equation, so it sound alike a win win to me.
     
  8. Corley
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    Corley epoxy coated

    How does titanium react to standard cutting processes like laser and water cutting? I'm interested as I have a lot of heavy stainless parts in my next project that could be replaced with titanium.
     
  9. Stumble
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    Stumble Senior Member

    Again I am a salesman not a machinist so I would bow to a real expert on this.

    Generally water cutting titanium is fine. A standard 60kpsi machine will make short work of up to around 2" thick plate, past that I have no knowledge, but I can't see any problems with it. The one caviat to this is if the part is being used in highly engineered situations like chemical processing plants, where the garnet contamination can be a problem. This is really a QC issue that is very application dependent. I know for instance that some chemical plants can't take water jet cut stuff, but the military uses it for armor, and there is a good quantity of water jet cut stuff used in aerospace. Tolerances can meet or exceede .001".

    Laser cutting titanium is often used where water jet cutting is an issue, and wherever the shop has one, and not a water jet. Back when laser cutting was still extremely rare (1970's or so) one of its first uses was titanium, simply because the metal cost justified the higher production costs at the time. Argon gas has to be used as a shielding material to prevent oxygen embrittlement, but this is very well understood in the titanium business.

    If someone has some specific questions or would like a more qualified answer I don't mind passing them up to our production engineers. I have been studying titanium fabrication for a while now, but I wouldn't consider myself an expert on it.


    One of the coolest production methods we recently started working with is called sintering. Where we pour powdered titanium into a mold, then pressurize and heat the powder. Under the high temp and preassure the powder actually plastically melds into a single piece. The best part of this is you get the quality of a machined part, but the geometry control of a cast part.


    Corley,

    If you are interested I would be happy to price some stuff out for you. Frankly most people are amaze at the actual price versus the perceived cost. Despite what people think titanium is closer to the range of 316L stainless than it is to the price of unobtanium. While it used to be true that it was impossibly expensive for an average boater, that really isn't true anymore.
     
  10. upchurchmr
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    upchurchmr Senior Member

    If they want a reference I can provide more data. The software is not free of course, but seems simple to use. I talked with the programmer and project lead in the test case.

     
  11. BMcF
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    BMcF Senior Member

    You aren't paying attention..or do not want to.

    We are in the ship motion controls business to make money. Rest assured that we would not be fabricating our underwater appendages entirely in titanium were there not very large advantages...advantages our customers are willing to pay for.


    Titanium has the strength of high-strength steel but the weight of aluminum. It does not erode like aluminum. It does not corrode like steel or aluminum.

    It is easy to machine and easy to weld. The as-welded strength is the same as the parent metal strength (aluminum can lose more than half of its rated tensile strength in the weld-affected zone.) And here is a the real beauty of it..the fatigue strength of the Ti alloy (6AL4V) we use is almost the same as the tensile strength! Anyone who has to design with aluminum (which can have a fatigue limit of < 25% of tensile) quickly realizes how that makes Ti hugely more efficient in any structure subjected to reversing cylclic loading.
     
  12. BMcF
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    BMcF Senior Member

    We use mostly water cutting.
     
  13. BMcF
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    BMcF Senior Member

    We use various setups, some manual and some automatic, and all are TIG (GTAW). Its also all done "in the open" with no inert gas enclosures or anything like that. Two, and sometimes three, gas sources are used to shield the weld zone.

    Here..some pictures of some pretty welds. These were all manually done; the welding "walking robots" are used on the larger structural welds.
     

    Attached Files:

  14. BMcF
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    BMcF Senior Member

    Dur. I was going going to guess "Small Motor Vessel". :p
     

  15. redreuben
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    redreuben redreuben

    Not sure if this has been mentioned already but titanium is the preferred fastener for carbon(graphite) composites due to there closeness on the periodic table.
     
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