The Emerging Third Metal—Titanium Alloys

Titanium is an important metal that entered industrial production in the early 1950s.

Featuring excellent properties and abundant reserves, titanium ranks third in importance among structural metals after iron and aluminum, and is renowned as the rising “third metal”.

Titanium possesses a number of critical properties, including low density, high specific strength, excellent corrosion resistance, low coefficient of thermal expansion, low thermal conductivity, non-magnetism, good biocompatibility, and high surface magnetizability.

It also exhibits special functional properties such as hydrogen storage, superconductivity, shape memory effect, superelasticity and high damping capacity.

It serves not only as a high-quality lightweight corrosion-resistant structural material, but also as a novel functional material and an important biomedical material.

Among its numerous properties, titanium has two most prominent advantages: high specific strength and excellent corrosion resistance, which enable its wide applications in aviation, land, marine and outer space fields, including aerospace, conventional weapons, naval vessels and marine engineering, nuclear power and thermal power generation, chemical and petrochemical industries, metallurgy, construction, transportation, sports equipment and daily necessities.