Enhancing the high temperature capability of Ti-alloys

Titanium and its alloys can not be used at elevated temperatures in oxidizing environment because the rutile layer gets deteriorated. With increasing temperature the passivation vanishes which protects the alloys at low temperatures. Furthermore the enhanced oxygen inward diffusion at elevated temperatures worsens the mechanical properties by -case formation. To overcome this problem a combined Al- plus F-treatment was developed. The combination of Al-enrichment at the surface zone so that intermetallic TiyAlx-layers are formed plus stabilisation of the alumina formation by the fluorine effect led to good results in high temperature exposure tests of several Ti-alloys. In this paper the achieved improvements are described and the results will be discussed for a use of Ti-alloys in several high temperature applications.