For those, they are actively swapped around where cost vs weight trade offs happen.
steel vs aluminum vs magnesium, vs titanium in engineering application, where for example engine blocks, airplane parts, car parts, battery components, etc. all have a long history of this.
It’s a complicated process because the trade offs are not simple cost/weight/strength.
Steel has an nearly infinite fatigue lifetime for instance, so steel springs are great.
Aluminum does not, so aluminum springs are terrible - among other things. No amount of weight savings can likely fix that problem in a useful way.
These pose big challenges in aircraft in particular where aluminum skins and fuselages make flight doable/economic, but means pressurized aircraft in particular have a finite lifespan in pressurization cycles/takeoffs and landings before they fall apart, no matter how nicely you treat them.
Several major accidents (including the top of an airliner coming off and sucking a flight attendant out over the pacific on the way to Hawaii) happened before this was fully understood.
Titanium is in theory much better, but is incredibly difficult to work with(requiring forgings in most cases, and being almost unmachinable), and very expensive as the bond it forms with oxygen is so strong the normal fluorine based processing used with Aluminum won’t work. Yeah, you read that right.
Fire danger (such as magnesium engine blocks burning) is also a non trivial thing to mitigate. Titanium can be one of the worst offenders here (powdered titanium fires can burn SAND used to try to put it out as an oxidizer), which makes working with it hazardous in some cases. Iron, which will also burn, is generally so mellow when it does that burning it is a normal operation while scrapping and cutting it and you can’t get a runaway from doing so except in truly difficult to achieve circumstances (it’s what an oxy-acetylene cutting torch is doing).
Pressurization cycles is what killed the reputation of the first commercial civilian jet, the De Havilland Comet.
The British were good in early jet design and actually introduced jet aircraft into the non-military world, but the early hulls would fail catastrophically after a certain, relatively low # of cycles, tearing the fuselage apart mid-flight and killing everyone on board. After several such incidents in short order, the entire fleet was grounded and scientists came up with solutions, but by then, the reputation of Comets was tarnished and Boeing came with a competing 707 model.
These days, the UK does not have a domestic jet manufacturer anymore.
> Titanium is in theory much better, but is incredibly difficult to work with(requiring forgings in most cases, and being almost unmachinable), and very expensive as the bond it forms with oxygen is so strong the normal fluorine based processing used with Aluminum won’t work. Yeah, you read that right.
I have a spoon bought from Amazon which they claim is made from titanium. [Lockheed_SR-71_Blackbird](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_SR-71_Blackbird)
claims 31 aircraft made from titanium and first flew in 1964. Given they got it off the ground in 1964 and can make a spoon in 2022 what kind of machining problems are left to solve for titanium? Usually it's the other way round like make s spoon from wood for 5,000 years then make an aircraft in 1905.
If it is the same type of spoon I’m thinking of - they are indeed titanium! Forged titanium, at least the version I got.
Because it’s a small part with no significant critical tolerances, it’s also only $10-$20 for a few grams of metal, and only 5x as expensive as a typical spoon.
The equipment required to forge it is also doable in a garage due to the small surface area the forging is happening over (force required goes up as the surface area goes up - which is squared for the dimensions, so very rapidly gets very large).
It isn’t truly impossible to machine titanium (generally - like most metals the alloy, heat treatment, etc. matter a lot), it’s just so much harder and requires so much more expensive tooling that it’s hard to justify economically except in niche applications.
It’s improving though with better insert based machining tools and hardier insert material.
I’ve heard of some impressive titanium 3D printing using sintering techniques that also have a lot of promise.
Many of the alloys (many more than say aluminum) are nearly impossible due to material characteristics and do require EDM to machine.
Decades ago I happened to get a tour of the Edwards Air Force Base SR71 hangar (near the end of their effective time in service) and the machinists there were very proud of their EDM work for this reason.
>Several major accidents (including the top of an airliner coming off and sucking a flight attendant out over the pacific on the way to Hawaii)
It was actually an inter-island flight so lots of short flights (and therefore pressurization cycles relative to flight hours or miles). The amazing thing was that the plane was able to make an emergency landing.
Thanks for tracking down the specific incident! If I remember correctly, the obvious cycling issue got figured out pretty early (60’s?) - due to other earlier accidents, that part wasn’t a surprise and they thought they had figured out how to deal with it.
There was a presumption that like steel and several other materials, once it hit a specific low stress point the fatigue life became infinite, and that point was just so much lower for aluminum it just LOOKED like it has no infinitive fatigue life point.
For those, they are actively swapped around where cost vs weight trade offs happen.
steel vs aluminum vs magnesium, vs titanium in engineering application, where for example engine blocks, airplane parts, car parts, battery components, etc. all have a long history of this.
It’s a complicated process because the trade offs are not simple cost/weight/strength.
Steel has an nearly infinite fatigue lifetime for instance, so steel springs are great.
Aluminum does not, so aluminum springs are terrible - among other things. No amount of weight savings can likely fix that problem in a useful way.
These pose big challenges in aircraft in particular where aluminum skins and fuselages make flight doable/economic, but means pressurized aircraft in particular have a finite lifespan in pressurization cycles/takeoffs and landings before they fall apart, no matter how nicely you treat them.
Several major accidents (including the top of an airliner coming off and sucking a flight attendant out over the pacific on the way to Hawaii) happened before this was fully understood.
Titanium is in theory much better, but is incredibly difficult to work with(requiring forgings in most cases, and being almost unmachinable), and very expensive as the bond it forms with oxygen is so strong the normal fluorine based processing used with Aluminum won’t work. Yeah, you read that right.
Fire danger (such as magnesium engine blocks burning) is also a non trivial thing to mitigate. Titanium can be one of the worst offenders here (powdered titanium fires can burn SAND used to try to put it out as an oxidizer), which makes working with it hazardous in some cases. Iron, which will also burn, is generally so mellow when it does that burning it is a normal operation while scrapping and cutting it and you can’t get a runaway from doing so except in truly difficult to achieve circumstances (it’s what an oxy-acetylene cutting torch is doing).