title: Titanium and Titanium Alloys: Fundamentals and Applications
author: Christoph Leyens
description: Titanium alloys are well known as materials for the aerospaceindustry already since the 1940s. Nowadays, due to their superiorproperties- high specific strength, excellent corrosion resistance they find increasing applications in chemical engineering,for body implants like hip replacements on in the off-shoreindustry, energy or automotive industry. Not to forget theincreasing demand of the sports and consumer goods industry, e.g.for golf clubs, bicycles or jewelry, that make titanium a part ofour everyday life already.
zlib_text: 3.1
  3
  Titanium
  Steven Yue
  Dept. of Metallurgical Engineering
  McGill University
  Montreal, Quebec
  Simon Durham
  Materials Engineering
  Pratt & Whitney Canada
  Longueuil, Quebec
  3.1 Introduction
  Titanium was discovered as the mineral rutile (TiO2) at the end of the
  eighteenth century by Gregor and Klaproth. It is the fourth most
  abundant metal on the planet, in comparison to, for example, iron,
  which is the second most abundant metal. There is a large mineral
  supply, with most of the oxide going into pigmentation applications.
  Despite the relative profusion of titanium oxide, however, commercial
  production of the metal only commenced in about 1950. There are
  many reasons why the commercialization of titanium began so late.
  One reason is the perceived difﬁculty in separating the metal from ox-
  ygen. It is certainly true that the Kroll extraction process is somewhat
  daunting compared to that of other “commodity” metals. The Kroll
  process begins by converting the titanium dioxide to the tetrach