Titanium aircraft part isothermal forging case study

Buy-to-fly economics. A 1988 aircraft rib part with an eggcrate construction: conventional forging weight 154 kg, superplastic-formed weight ~109 kg, finish machined weight 28 kg. Conventional buy-to-fly ratio ~6:1; superplastic saves 45 kg of titanium per part. At $300/kg titanium plus ~$300/kg machining, savings dominate part economics.

The other thing you can do is to use a die that has high hot strength and use something today that's superplastic. You can do everything essentially in a single die. Superplasticity — Backofen rediscovered it, if you will, back in the early '60s. [Tom locates a sample part.] This is an example of a part. It was made in 1988, but in some of the superplasticity work people were forming superplastic titanium parts by the mid '70s. That's one of the quickest adoptions of technology — less than fifteen years — of any technology I can think of. The average time to adopt a new technology in materials processing is about twenty years. To do it in ten or twelve years is incredible. Just demonstrates the need.