Titanium alloy rod material milling processing and advantages

Titanium alloy has high strength, high fracture toughness, good corrosion resistance and weldability. As aircraft fuselages increasingly adopt composite structures, the proportion of titanium-based materials used in the fuselages will also increase, because the bonding properties of titanium and composite materials are far better than aluminum alloys. For example: Compared with aluminum alloy, titanium alloy can increase the life of the fuselage structure by 60%.

The extremely high strength/density ratio of titanium alloys (up to 20:1, which means that the weight can be reduced by 20%) provides a solution for reducing the weight of large components (this is the main challenge for aircraft designers). In addition, the inherent high corrosion resistance of titanium rectangular rod (compared to steel) can save the cost of daily operation and maintenance of aircraft.

Because it is more difficult to process than ordinary alloy steel, titanium alloys are generally considered to be difficult to process materials. The metal removal rate of a typical titanium alloy is only about 25% of that of most ordinary steel or stainless steel, so the time required to process a titanium alloy workpiece is about 4 times that of steel.

In order to meet the growing demand for titanium alloy processing in the aerospace industry, manufacturers need to increase production capacity, and therefore need to better understand the effectiveness of titanium alloy processing strategies. The processing of a typical 6al4v titanium rod workpiece starts from forging until 80% of the material is removed to obtain the final shape of the workpiece.

With the rapid growth of the aerospace parts market, manufacturers have felt powerless, coupled with the increased processing demand due to low efficiency, resulting in obvious tension in the processing capacity of titanium alloys. Some leading companies in the aviation manufacturing industry even publicly question whether the existing machining capabilities can complete all the processing tasks of new titanium alloy workpieces. Since these workpieces are usually made of new alloys, the processing methods and tool materials need to be changed.