4 ms·

Next up should be titanium: http://www.defensenews.com/article/20110720/DEFSECT04/107200305/Breakthroughs-Promise-Cheaper-Titanium http://www.defensenews.com/ar

• sjwright 13y ago
  Or as Americans like to call it, Titanum.
  • e1l1 13y ago
    Ha. No, we don't, but I guess we should.
  • Lagged2Death 13y ago
    Did you know that "Aluminum" was the discoverer's own spelling, and was actually used in Britain soon after the naming? "Aluminium" was an arbitrary revision made because influential people just liked it better. In other words, the British spelling was just a matter of British cultural hegemony at the time, just as American spellings are matters of American cultural hegemony today. http://www.worldwidewords.org/articles/aluminium.htm http://www.worldwidewords.org/articles/aluminium.htm I didn't know any of this until just now.
    • btbuilder 13y ago
      The link you posted says: "Sir Humphry made a bit of a mess of naming this new element, at first spelling it alumium (this was in 1807) then changing it to aluminum, and finally settling on aluminium in 1812." To me it reads that British academics (Sir Humphry's peers) prefered the -ium spelling. It doesn't say they used political pressure to force him to change it. While the use of both spellings were in almost equal use in the general British and US populations for a long time, the article hypothesises that the -um spelling became dominant in the US because of Webster's -um entry.
  • yaddayadda 13y ago
    No, we don't. Nor should we.
  • philwelch 13y ago
    Or as British like to call it, "Titaninium".
• Gravityloss 13y ago
  "the cost of titanium will drop by a factor of two to five" Steel is easy to weld (depends on type, but generally) Aluminum is harder Titanium is even harder. It reacts with nitrogen. Steel is relatively easy to machine Aluminum can be even easier. Titanium is very hard. Sounds like there might be some roadblocks on wide spread adoption of titanium still, even if the raw material gets cheaper. The SR-71 was largely constructed out of titanium since the whole airframe heated up to high temperatures in high speed flight. The maintenance facilities had welding stations that had nitrogenless atmospheres under a "bubble".
  • na85 13y ago
    >Steel is relatively easy to machine Aluminum can be even easier. Mechanical engineer here. This depends heavily on the alloy you're dealing with. Many Aluminum alloys are so soft that they'll actually melt and subsequently bond to the tool surface when they're being cut/ground/sanded/etc. Also Aluminum tends to have a very low shear strength which means it won't hold a thread the way most steels will - this is why you typically see rivets in aircraft skin.
    • HeyLaughingBoy 13y ago
      As I discovered the first time I tried to machine an aluminum extrusion. I was used to 6061 alloys that machined very well dry, but this "hardware-store grade" extrusion softened enough to weld itself to a nice Niagara endmill, ruining it :-(