U.S. Navy heavy-section titanium welding (1980s)

Titanium, 75 times. In the old days I was involved in some of the early titanium submarine stuff. My first research contract was on welding of heavy-section titanium for the Navy. Austenitic nickel-based alloys, things like Inconels — your nuclear reactor materials — 100 times the cost. So we've got two orders of magnitude difference in cost of metals.

The Navy spent millions on gas metal arc welding of titanium that the Soviets had already determined didn't work. After Tom's electroslag and semi-submerged GTA findings, the Navy classified the research. The Sea Cliff submersible (§6.p4) was the Navy's own attempt — they ultimately gave up on GMAW and went back to slow GTA.

So in the mid-1980s you will see coming out of Ohio State all these projects on trying to do Marangoni flow for gas tungsten arc. They wanted to make it work for steel. Doesn't work so well for steel; works great for titanium. The Soviets were doing it in the 60s. I was the only person outside of the US Navy welding heavy-section titanium — that's another story. In 1980 when the Alpha sub came out, and then I tried the electroslag, kind of a light went on at this meeting. I thought, that's why Gurevich was doing this — like I had been trying to do submerged arc — and then I started thinking of his semi-submerged arc. So I came back and I did electroslag welding, semi-submerged arc with this little flux for gas tungsten arc, and then the Navy classified everything, so I quit doing any of that work. You can't do classified work on campus. I didn't want to even touch it. I basically sort of quit doing most of my titanium work at that point.

The classified context for Tom's electroslag titanium work — once it became clear the technology was militarily useful, Tom's project was classified and he could no longer work on it. Forms the policy frame around the technical content.

Electric Boat has a whole facility down at Quonset Point to get the extreme circularity you need for a good pressure hull in steel. They have an indoor building that cost $200 million down at Quonset Point so they can weld these things. They weren't using electroslag, they were using gas metal arc on the steel. But you could do that with electroslag, and the Soviets, the Paton Institute, were the leader in electroslag technology in the whole world. Gurevich had quit publishing on any of the titanium work, and so on my titanium project, when I came back, we took some of our one-inch plate and we made the first electroslag weld outside of one research project in France and the Soviet Union — at least the first one I know of. We made it just in the room next door. It was a terrible weld, no fusion, but we found that titanium is easier to electroslag weld than steel.

Tom's first research project, 1977: Navy contract to weld 1-inch-thick titanium for submarines. Shown as physical artifact in lecture. US never built a titanium submarine other than *Alvin*.

So they had a huge welding institute and they developed technologies like — if you've ever read The Hunt for Red October or seen the movie, they had titanium submarines. My first research project, in 1977, was from the US Navy to weld titanium for submarines. [Tom holds up a 1977-era titanium weld sample.] This probably belongs in the Smithsonian. We were welding 1-inch-thick titanium for submarines. The United States wanted to build titanium submarines. We never built one, other than the deep-sea research vessel Alvin that went down and found the Titanic. The Navy built that as part of a prototype program to learn to weld titanium for bigger ships, because titanium submarines have the same strength-to-weight ratio advantage that aircraft and fast-moving vehicles need. You want high strength-to-weight so you can dive deeper and, hopefully, if you lose power, pop to the surface rather than sink to the bottom — because if you sink to the bottom, everything gets crushed, including the people inside.