The latest R&D of new-type titanium alloys and their aviation applications as well as the newly developed processing technologies in China have been reviewed in this paper. To meet the requirements of high performance and low cost design of aviation-oriented titanium alloys, great efforts and achievements have been made in establishing a system with Chinese characteristics, in which the low-strength-and-high-toughness titanium alloy (such as Ti45Nb alloy used for fasteners and TA18 for tubes & pipes), the medium-strength and high-damage-tolerance titanium alloy (such as TC4-DT used for large-integral airframe structures), the high-strength and high-toughness damage tolerance titanium alloy (such as TC21 used for large-integral airframe structures), and the ultra-high strength titanium alloy (such as TB8) are included. Some new processing technologies such as quasi-β forging and quasi-β heat treatment, integral isothermal forging and electron beam welding, have been demonstrated to be able to markedly enhance the properties of titanium alloys, which is regarded to be very important in increasing the application amount and level of titanium in aviation industry.

Ti-Mo-Nb-Cr-Al-Fe-Si alloy is a new metastable β titanium alloy with excellent combination of strength and ductility. The β grain-growth exponent and the activation energies for β grain growth for the investigated alloy at specified temperature were computed by the kinetic equations and the Arrhenius-type equation. The rate of β grain growth decreases with elongating solution treated time and increases with the increasing solution-treated temperature. The β grain-growth exponents, n, are 0.461, 0.464 and 0.469 at 1113, 1133 and 1153K, respectively. The β grain growth activation energy is determined to be 274 KJ/mol.

The hot deformation behavior of Ti-4.5Al-3V-2Mo-2Fe (SP-700) titanium alloy in the temperature range of 650°C~950°C and constant strain rate of 0.01, 0.1, 1 and 10s-1 has been investigated by hot compressive testing on the Gleeble-1500D thermal simulation test machine. The experimental results indicated that the hot deformation behavior of SP-700 alloy was sensitive to the deformation temperature and strain rate. The peak flow stress decreased with the increase of temperature and the decrease of strain rate. The flow curves characteristic under different deformation parameters show significant different. Analysis of the flow stress dependence on strain rate and temperature gives a stress exponent of n as 4.8235 and a deformation activation energy of Q as 410kJ/mol. Based on the dynamic materials model, the processing map is generated, which shows that the most peak efficiency domain appears at the temperature of 725°C~775°C and the strain rate of 0.001 s-1~0.003s-1 with a peak efficiency of 45% at about 750°C/0.01s-1.

The hot deformation behavior of Ti-Al-Nb-Zr-Mo-Cr titanium alloy was studied by hot compressive method in this paper, and the flow stress constitutive equation and activation energy also calculated. The results show that the flow stress increased with deformation temperature dropping and strain rate increasing. The flow behavior of the sample hot-deformaed exhibited a peak value of stress in the α+β field, whereas, the true stress attained a steady state in the β field. According to the stress-strain curves of the alloy and its stress characteristics, the Arrhenius constitutive equation was obtained. The average activation energy was about 654.228 KJ/mol in the α+β field, and about 272.196 KJ/mol in the β field, respectively.

This article investigated the fatigue crack growth behaviors in the novel TC32 titanium alloy with bimodal and basket-weave microstructures, which were respectively obtained by the convectional (α+β) phase forging and quasi-β forging processing. Results showed that at the same level of tensile performance, the basket-weave microstructure had a lower fatigue crack growth rate than the bimodal microstructure, as the basket-weave microstructure had a more tortuous crack path, a rougher fracture surface and more secondary cracks. All these served to improve the fatigue crack growth resistance, which attributed largely to the effects of crack closure. Moreover, secondary cracks grew primarily along the α/β interfaces for the basket-weave microstructure but directly went across the colony-type lamellar (α+β) phase and the primary α phase without obvious regularity for the bimodal microstructure.