Titanium is a silvery-white metal first discovered by the English chemist William Gregor in 1791. Lightweight and durable, it quickly attracted the attention of designers. But it took more than a hundred years after its discovery, before titanium began to actually be used in industry.
Titanium has many advantages and only one significant drawback is its high cost. The latter circumstance led to the fact that titanium, first of all, began to be used for strategic purposes. It was only much later that titanium found application in medicine and civilian industries.
The specific gravity of titanium is 4, 505 grams per cubic centimeter. Compare with iron - 7, 8 grams per cubic centimeter and aluminum - 2, 7 grams. At the same time, the strength of titanium is two times higher than that of iron and almost six times higher than the strength of aluminum. It is especially important that titanium retains its strength at high temperatures. It is this circumstance that determined the widespread use of titanium in aviation and rocketry. In modern aircraft, military and civilian, the heaviest parts are made of titanium. This allows a significant gain in weight to be obtained while maintaining the required strength characteristics. Blades and many other parts of jet engines are made of titanium.
Titanium is widely used in shipbuilding. The world's fastest nuclear submarine, the Soviet K-162, was made of titanium. On trials in 1970, she managed to develop an underwater speed of 44.7 knots, or 82.78 km / h. This speed record has not been broken so far. But with all its outstanding characteristics, this boat turned out to be very expensive due to the use of titanium, therefore it went down in history under one more name - "Goldfish".
Despite its high cost, titanium has found wide application in medicine. In particular, it is used in the manufacture of artificial joints and in the treatment of complex fractures - the damaged bone is fastened using titanium elements. This use of titanium became possible due to its high strength and good compatibility with human tissues.
Titanium is used as an alloying additive in the production of quality steels. Due to its high corrosion resistance, it is widely used in the chemical industry in the production of chemical reactors, tanks, pipelines.
Increasingly, you can find titanium in everyday life, different tools are being made from it. Titanium shovels are very popular. The earth does not stick to such shovels, they are lighter than steel ones.
The only limiting factor for the widespread distribution of titanium is still its high price. If one ever finds a cheap way to get titanium, this wonderful metal will become even more widespread.
