Titanium - The Metal That Made The SR-71

Possible - YouTube
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We recently explored the fascinating engineering that made the SR71 possible,
detailing its unique hybrid engines, coolant systems, and much more. But we
neglected to explore one of the most fascinating aspects of its design, the new and
exciting material science that made it possible. The SR71 speed was not limited
by the power of its engines, it was limited by the heat its structure could
withstand. Today we're going to explore titanium, a material that composed 93%
of the SR71 structure, a material that had never been truly utilised to its full
potential until the SR71 came along. We will explore its material properties, how
it's made and how the engineers of the SR71 overcame the challenges they
encountered while using the innovative new material.

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Titanium is one of those words that has entered common language. It's become
synonymous with strength. Sea likens titanium to being bulletproof and yes, with
the right thickness it is bulletproof. That's why it's used in the A10 to protect the
pilot. But in reality, the strongest titanium alloys are only about as strong as the
strongest steel alloys and their temperature tolerance is actually worse while
aluminium is lighter. What makes titanium special is not its tensile strength,
waste, or high temperature performance, but a combination of all of these material
properties that made it perfect for the SR71. When choosing materials for a
particular application, engineers will often consult something called a material
selection diagram where we plot two material properties on the X&Y axis. This
allows us to see the relative benefits of materials, so we can choose the material
according to our needs. Here is a particularly relevant

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material selection diagram for the aerospace industry, with density on the X axis
and strength the maximum pressure it can withstand before breaking on the Y
axis. Our three primary metallic material choices for aircraft structures are
aluminium, steel and titanium, located here, here and here. They spread across the
Y axis because different alloys have different strengths. Steel is by far the
heaviest, which rules it out of most aircraft structures, but it still gets used where
its strength and heat tolerance is needed. We can also see that aluminium is in fact
lighter than titanium, but titanium is stronger than aluminium. A better measure
here is the strength to waste ratio, the ratio found by dividing the mental strength
by its density. After all, we can make an aluminium part stronger by just adding
more material. But if we need to add so much material that the part is now heavier
than an equivalent strength part made from titanium,
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then it's not worth it. Here titanium winds its strength to weight ratio or specific
strength is better than aluminium. Yes, today very little titanium is used in
aviation Planes primarily use aluminium, not titanium. Why is that? One reason?
It's really expensive. Despite titanium being the ninth most common element in
Earth's crust at a percent weight of 0.6%, there is more titanium in the Earth's
crust than carbon and element no one considers rare. Yet in its purified form it
currently costs about four and a half $1000 per metric tonne. Aluminium, in
comparison, cost 1/3 of that at a grand and 1/2 per metric tonne, which itself is a
relatively expensive metal as a result of the high energy electrolysis refinement
process to boost that is today's price, which has dropped dramatically since the
SR71 was created. Titanium is expensive because its refinement process
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is a nightmare. To make titanium, we start with the feedstock in the form of
titanium dioxide with this chemical formula. This oxide ore, called rutile, can be
found in high concentrations in these dark sandy soils. To build the SR-71, the US
needed to buy vast quantities of the mineral from the Soviets, who had large
deposits of rutile. To do this, they purchased the material through ghost
organisations to hide the final destination of the material. Had the Soviets known
what they were helping to build, they would not have sold that material. However,
the US likely could have just purchased the material from mines in Australia.

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This is a relatively common raw material and is primarily used as a white pigment
for paints, and is even found in sunscreen lotion as an ultraviolet radiation
blocking pigment. Our trouble begins when we need to separate these two oxygen
molecules to get pure titanium for iron ore refinement. We heat it in the presence
of carbon to force the oxygen to separate from the iron and bind to the carbon to
form carbon dioxide with aluminium oxide. Its melting point is too high, so we
instead dissolve it in a solvent and then use electrolysis to separate the oxygen
molecule. Neither of these methods work with titanium. Titanium dioxide is both
thermally stable and resistant to chemical attack. In the 1940s, the first reliable
process to produce a chemically pure form of titanium was developed, Called the
Kroll process. This process made the SR71 possible. It begins by first converting
the titanium dioxide to titanium chloride.

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To do this, titanium dioxide is mixed with chlorine and pure carbon and heat it.
Any oxygen or nitrogen leaking in will ruin the process, so this has to be done in
relatively small batches in a sealed vessel. Once this process is complete, we have
titanium chloride. We then need to purify the titanium chloride from any
impurities in the titanium or through distillation, where we heat the product and
separate titanium chloride using its lower boiling point. This titanium chloride
vapour is fed into a stainless steel vessel containing molten magnesium at 1300
Kelvin. Titanium is highly reactive with oxygen at higher temperatures, so the
vessel also needs to be sealed and filled with Aragon. Here the titanium chloride
reacts with the magnesium, which itself is an expensive metal to form titanium
and magnesium chloride. This reduction reaction is extremely slow, taking
between two and four days.

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Then once the reaction is complete, we need to let the product cool before
removing the magnesium chloride products through high temperature distillation.
Once again the magnesium and chlorine are recycled with electrolysis, another
energy intensive process. At this stage we have titanium sponge which needs
further processing still. Typically a porous metal like this would simply be heated
and compressed into rolls of sheet metal or some other form of useful and
product. But titanium, as we said, will react with oxygen and nitrogen if heated
this high. We can't do that. So the titanium sponge is compressed into an electrode
along with any alloying metals needed. Heat is then generated through an electric
arc current inside another sealed vessel. This form of heat needs no oxygen. This
melts the electrode to form a large titanium ingot. This process results in an
incredibly expensive material that becomes even more expensive as a result of the
difficulty. The engineers

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found when attempting to form it into its final shape, the engineers of the SR71
were among the first people in history to make real use of the material. In that
process, they ended up throwing away a lot of material, some through necessity,
some through error. At times the engineers were perplexed as what was causing
problems, but thankfully they documented and catalogued everything which
helped find trends in their failures. They discovered that spot welded parts made
in summer were failing very early in their life, but those welded in winter were
fine. They eventually tracked the problem to the fact that the Burbank Water
treatment facility was adding chlorine to the water they used to clean the parts to
prevent algae blooms in the summer, but took it out in winter. Chlorine, as we
saw earlier, reacts with titanium, so they began using distilled water. From this
point on they discovered that their cadmium plated tools were leaving trace
amounts of cadmium on the bolts, which would cause
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Levana corrosion and caused the bolts to fail. This discovery led to all the
cadmium tools being removed from the workshop. However, the largest wastes
were caused by the lack of appropriate forging presses. In the United States,
titanium alloys require much higher pressure to deform during forging than
aluminium alloys or steel alloys. The best forge in the United States at the time
could only produce 20% of the pressures needed to form these titanium parts.
Clarence Well Johnson, the manager of skunkworks at the time, pleaded for the
development of an adequate forging press, which he stated would need to be a
250,000 tonne metal forming press. Because of these inadequacies in forming
capabilities, the final forging dimensions were nowhere near the design
dimensions and much of the forming process had to be completed through
machining, meaning most of the material was cut away to form the parish,
resulting in 90% of the material going to waste.

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When your raw material costs this much, this kind of waste really hurts. To add
insult to injury, drill bits and other machining tools were being thrown away at a
rapid pace. Titanium is a difficult material to machine precisely because of its
qualities that made it suitable for use in the SR-71. This is a material selection
diagram with thermal conductivity on the X axis and thermal expansion on the Y
axis. Here we can see that titanium has low values for both among the lowest 4
metals. It's low thermal expansion made accommodating thermal expansion as the
plane heated up easier, but measures still had to be made to prevent it causing
stress. The skin panels were fastened to the underlying structure with oblong
holes which would allow the skin to expand and contract without the fasteners
causing buckling, and the skin over the wing was also corrugated to prevent
warping during expansion. This is actually quite noticeable. You can see the
sections that are corrugated

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quite clearly here. This didn't affect machining difficulties, but the extremely low
thermal conductivity did. Machining metals produces a lot of heat that can
damage the tool and cause unfavourable material properties in the titanium like
hardening, which means the metal under the fresh cut is now harder and therefore
even more damaging to the tool. This is usually minimised with coolant, but
titanium's low thermal conductivity means very little heat is transferred into the
coolant. To deal with this, lower machining speeds need to be used along with
high volumes of coolant, which is also expensive. This slows the rate heat is
generated and increases the rate it is removed. This slower machine speed makes
the process incredibly slow, but this is offset by taking deeper cuts in each pass,
which has the added benefit of cutting under the work hardened layers. Titanium
is also more sensitive to dull tools as the stiffness is quite low. Machinists referred
to metals like this as being gummy.
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They tend to form long chips that can clog the work area and cause all sorts of
problems. If not properly managed, they can ruin the work surface and damage
the tools. The engineers at Lockheed gradually learned these lessons and
developed better tools for the job. When the first version of the SR71 was being
constructed, the drill bits used to cut the holes for the rivets could only drill 17
holes before they were unusable and needed to be discarded. By the end of the
SR71 programme, they had developed a new drill bit that could drill 100 holes
and then be sharpened for further use. By the end of the programme, the engineers
found enough improvements to save $19 million on the manufacturing
programme.

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It's pretty clear that titanium is expensive and extremely difficult to work with.
Had aluminium been an option for the SR71 with a little bit of added weight, the
engineers would have jumped at the opportunity. But aluminium simply cannot
deal with the temperatures that steel and titanium can. This is the material
selection diagram displaying several metals specific strength as a function of
temperature. This is ultimately what made titanium so attractive for the SR71.
Titanium alloys maintain a great deal of their went up to temperatures as high as
450°C. The same cannot be said for aluminium. What I find fascinating is that
titanium's Max operating temperature is less a function of loss in strength, but a
function of oxidation. Pure titanium is highly reactive to oxygen which forms an
oxide layer on the outside of the metal which is brittle. This oxide layer has some
benefits as it provides excellent corrosion resistance, which is why many
submarines use titanium to resist attack from salt water. But at higher
temperatures, this oxide layer and titanium are soluble to oxygen, which means
the oxygen can permeate through the outer oxide layer and diffuse into the metal,
causing the oxide layer to grow and eventually helps dangerous cracks to form.

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The primary titanium alloy used in the SR71 was 13% vanadium, 11% chromium
and 3% aluminium. Both chromium and aluminium form thermally stable oxide
layers on the outer skin of the metal which prevents oxygen from diffusing further
into the metal and causing it to become even more brittle which raises the Max
operating temperature of the metal. While the vanadium acts as a stabiliser for a
crystal structure referred to as the beta phase which leads to a material with higher
tensile strength and better formability with an ability to heat treats to a higher
strength. In my humble opinion, advancements in material science like this have
their largest knock on effect in the advancement of human technologies, so much
so that we name entire eras of human history after the materials we developed
during that time. During World War 2, the development of aluminium alloys
suitable for aviation allowed for the emergence of some incredible planes, and
with that some incredible tactics

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like aerial invasions, a method of invasion that first emerged in World War 2. I
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the planes navigate to their drop zones in an era before GPS, where the airborne
troops landed and why, and even explore some of the wooden gliders that were
used to carry heavy equipment into the battlefield. I am currently working on the
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signing up to Nebula, you will get access to future episodes and the four current
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deception tactics used to hide the location

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