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titanium in fighter jets

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prepare | 19:05 Sun 15th Jan 2006 | Science
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Does anybody know where titanium (including its aloys as long they are named) generaly used in fighter jets


if yes can you tell me a website that tells me specifically things like tensile strength (physics reasons) about the titanium used comparing to steel/aliminium (for example) with figures about steel and why steel isn't used


thnks in advance

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Well, I can't link to any websites though if I'm sure you looked up say Eurofighter, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, etc., then they may give specifications of their aircraft and details of components used in their aircraft.


Titanium is very strong and light and can be made slightly thicker than steel so it's as strong but also lighter. This has many advantages in that Titanium doesn't corrode plus it makes the aircraft lighter so it would have a better thrust to weight ratio which is very important in a fighter.


I know that the new JSF F-35 are experimenting with using more Titanium to lower the weight because this is an important factor for the STOVL version (short take off and vertical landing). Naval jets may use more Titanium as well because their undercarriage is often stronger to land on aircraft carriers.


The A-10 anti-tank plane uses a 'titanium bathtub' which is basically armour plating to protect the pilot. It's designed to withstand ground canon fire so it needs to be strong and light.


Titanium composites may also be used in engines along with other materials.


Although you didn't mention military helicopters, the main rotor hub is nearly always made of titanium for strength and lightness.


Okay, did a search on the Eurofighter website so have a look at http://www.eurofighter.com/Search/?what=titanium


Also try searching for JSF+titanium on Google as it brings up lots of links.

In military helcopters its generally used around the engines for heat protection, although the main bulk of some main rotor heads are titanium, as KebabMeister suggested. Main rotor head of the Army and Sea Lynx helicopters are solid titanium for strength and flexibility.
Wikipedia is your friend.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titanium

For mechanical properties of more materials than you even thought existed, Matweb is the best place to go. If you go to the search page, select Titanium Alloy as the search category, then under Material property, pick something like Tensile Strength (Ultimate) and enter 1 in the Min box and 10000000 in the max box, that should pick up everything! You'll get a load of results.


From the results, you can see that Pure Titanium is a pretty useless metal, but when it's alloyed with 6% Aluminium along with some other stuff, it gets a lot stronger.


In order to compare it to steel (or anything like that) or to justify its use (it's astonishingly expensive), you need to compare the "specific strengths" and "specific stiffnesses" of the materials in question. Have a look HERE for some more information.

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"From the results, you can see that Pure Titanium is a pretty useless metal, but when it's alloyed with 6% Aluminium along with some other stuff, it gets a lot stronger. (Titanium Ti-6Al-2Sn-4Zr-2Mo-0.1Si; Duplex Annealed)"



IS THAT THE ALLOY USED IN AIRCRAFTS COMMONLY KNOWN AS AIRCRAFT GRADE TITANIUM (or Ti 6.4) as there are so many different variations of alloy????

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4-get last question i found it


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