New & Improved Titanium Alloy for Lighter Vehicle Parts
An improved titanium alloy - stronger than any commercial titanium alloy currently on the market - gets its strength from the novel way atoms are arranged to form a special nanostructure. For the first time, researchers from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have been able to see this alignment and then manipulate it to make the strongest titanium alloy ever developed, along with a lower cost process. The material is an excellent candidate for producing lighter vehicle parts. Using powerful electron microscopes and a unique atom probe imaging approach, the researchers were able to peer deep inside the alloy's nanostructure to see what was happening. Once they understood the nanostructure, they were able to create the strongest titanium alloy ever made.
Transcript
00:00:01 researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory are using high-tech methods to see into a titanium alloy enhanced with an optimized heat treatment process in the end they've improved the alloy strength giving it more boost for potential use in the automotive industry what we do here is we heat treat it at between 1300° fah to 14 75°
00:00:25 F in order to rearrange the atoms uniformly in The Matrix and then we it for specific amounts of time to study how the atoms rearrange themselves then you essentially unal it again at a farly fairly lower temperature like 900° f we call this process as aging process and that is when certain atoms recombine together to form precipitates which give you that enhanced mechanical properties
00:00:51 specific high temperatures and repeated Heating and Cooling increases the strength of the titanium alloy with aluminum badium and Iron by 10 10 to 15% this Improvement is thanks to information gleaned by sophisticated Imaging techniques and Equipment this particular alloy uh was produced through a lowcost process by our industrial collaborators once we get the titanium
00:01:16 alloy rods we cut a piece of it and then we mount it and Polished it metallographically so to look at that we did arpro tomography which tells you where the individual atoms are located at a really small length scale so what we are looking at is how the atoms are distributed so the bluish regions did not all the uh titanium and aluminium atoms being segregating to that region
00:01:43 and the red and uh yellow region are the vadium and iron atom it's these small regions that increase the strength in the alloy the grouping of atoms at both the Nano and Micron scales act as a barrier that resists deformation when the material is put under stress both in the lab and one day on the road so if you can reduce the weight of the whole car you can go longer with the same
00:02:10 amount of fuel effectively pushing the fuel economy higher these kind of lowcost titanium Alloys can be a great material that can replace more heavier parts so that's where this research kind of connects to Humanity's goal of trying to depend Less on fossil fuel and reduce the CO2 emissions increasing the fuel economy all that aspect so really it will impact the energy saving aspects
00:02:34 for transportation [Music]