Stronger Titanium Alloy may be the path to Lighter Vehicles

Researchers, including those of Indian-origin have now developed a low-cost and lightweight titanium alloy, which is the strongest as of now and it may help build lighter vehicles that use less fuel. The improved titanium alloy which is supposed to be stronger than any commercial titanium alloy currently on the market obtains its strength from the way atoms are arranged to form a special nanostructure.

For the first time, researchers in the US have been able to see this alignment and then manipulate it to make the strongest titanium alloy ever developed with a lower cost processing. The material is excellent candidate to produce lighter vehicle parts.

Using powerful electron microscopes, they were able to look in deep inside the alloy's nanostructure to see more about the arrangement. Once they understood the nanostructure, they could recreate the strongest titanium alloy yet. "We found that if you heat treat it first with a higher temperature before a low-temperature heat treatment step, you could create a titanium alloy 10-15 percent stronger than any commercial titanium alloy currently on the market and that it has roughly double the strength of steel" researchers said. Researchers used electron microscopy to zoom into the alloy hundreds of nanometers scale - about 1,000th the width of an average human hair. They further zoomed in to see how the individual atoms are arranged in three dimensions.

This alloy is still more expensive than steel but with its strength-to-cost ratio, it becomes much more affordable with greater potential for lightweight automotive applications. By using extensive microscopy methods, researchers discovered that by the optimizing heat treating process, they could create micron sized and nano sized precipitate regions with high concentrations of certain elements.

When the strength was measured by pulling or applying tension and stretching it until it failed, the treated material achieved a 10-15 percent increase in strength which is significant, especially considering the low cost of the production process