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Is a gold titanium alloy any good? Few materials become more useful when alloyed with gold...


I have never heard of any use for a titanium-gold alloy.

On the other hand, titanium-palladium alloys are very useful because they have better corrosion resistance in various chemical media.

Palladium can be found in the iron-nickel alloys from meteorites and asteroids in relatively large concentrations, together with the other platinum-group elements.


It's a fairly new material but it already has some uses.

https://phys.org/news/2016-07-lab-titanium-gold-alloy-harder...


According to that description, that titanium-gold mixture appears to be an inter-metallic compound, not an alloy.

While the hardness and corrosion resistance should be excellent, as described there, inter-metallic compounds are brittle and it is unlikely that a Ti-Au compound will have better properties than usual and cheaper tough ceramics, like silicon nitride or zirconia.

The most important advantage of metallic alloys over alternatives for structural applications is their much higher toughness, an inter-metallic Ti-Au compound does not have this advantage, so I doubt that it can find an application.




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