Materials Perspective: A review of advances in processing and metallurgy of titanium alloys

Titanium and its alloys exhibit excellent mechanical properties, unrivalled corrosion resistance and outstanding biocompatibility; however, annual global titanium production is dwarfed by commodity metals. This is in part due to the current primary production method (Kroll process), which requires a complex and discontinuous reduction route in addition to several costly downstream processing steps to convert titanium sponge to usable product forms. Alternative extraction processes are reviewed in the present paper with emphasis on the electrochemical reduction routes, such as the Fray-Farthing-Chen (FFC) Cambridge process. Improvements in thermomechanical processing including the use of modelling are briefly examined. Alloy development is also discussed with particular regard to superelastic and shape memory alloys. © 2006 Institute of Materials. Minerals and Mining.