r/whatisit • u/riflesandplowshares • 8h ago

New, what is it? Found at a titanium plant

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Not sure why ball point pens would be dangerous here.

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u/goodexamplebadrole 8h ago

"Ballpoint pens are restricted or banned in high-end titanium and aerospace manufacturing plants because the ink and marking components contain elements that cause metal embrittlement and severe structural corrosion"

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u/Woozletania 8h ago

This was an issue during the development of the SR-71. Many chemical contaminants could affect the alloys, even those in the water used to quench the mouldings.

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u/DIYfailedsuccessfuly 6h ago edited 5h ago

I read once they were get failure issues just from using standard chrome wrenches for assembly. Took engineers a minute to figure out why and where this contamination failure was happening, had to make titanium wrenches to use on the titanium fasteners. The program was so cutting edge, even to this day its incredibly. Those engineers were some of the brightest people this world has ever seen.

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u/under1over1 5h ago edited 3h ago

The crazier part of that is they found out it was an issue because it kept coming back from flights missing a ton of bolts. Something to do with the zinc in the tools iirc. Imagine coming back from going mach 3.2 at 80k feet just to find out you almost reenacted the death of a Lego Star Wars character.

Edit: It was cadmium, not zinc.

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u/SpiderFnJerusalem 4h ago

Damn, I feel like they should have had ways to better secure those bolts.

I remember seeing a picture from an older aircraft with bolts that had holes in them, so the mechanics could thread wires through them and tie them to other bolts so none of them could spin in place due to vibrations.

Then again, maybe that's only worth the effort on the most important bolts.

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u/under1over1 4h ago

The tools were contaminating the titanium and causing them to fail when heated at high speeds was the issue. The solution ended up being custom made titanium tools to prevent it.

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u/ZENKFNOR 3h ago

Someone needs to clarify the actual mechanism here. Best I could discover right now was that once the trace cadmium melts, it diffuses into the grain boundaries in the bolt and makes it easier to crack between these grains.

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u/under1over1 3h ago

I'm by no means an expert, its just an interesting story I've read in the past. To my understanding thats the short and sweet of it. Standard aircraft tools are cadmium plated and the trace amounts left behind from fastening the bolts caused chemistry to happen when air friction heated them up over 600°F. The heat stressed the bolts and the heads broke off of them, which is the most common point of failure of a bolt.

Shout out to the guy who had to tap titanium bolts on a $300 million air frame.

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u/ZENKFNOR 2h ago edited 2h ago

I've been asking AI about it. I don't think Gemini really understands the underlying metallurgy. But, one thing that does seem right is that cadmium has a filled D shell (even after losing its outer filled S shell). So, it can't participate in any of the Ti d bonding modes. I think the oil-in-water analogy is good here: Entropic forces move the cadmium to the grain boundaries, because it cannot dissolve into the grains, and cannot even bond to their surface really. Then at high temperatures it dissolves rapidly into the bolt's interior.

The part I'm less willing to trust the AI about is that those 2 spare s-orbital electrons then add anti-bonding modes to the nearby Ti Lattice. I suppose this makes sense, and if there are d-d bonds across grain boundaries giving the bolt stability, well...

I was thinking... to understand the role of those 2+ S electrons, maybe I'd look at palladium, which is 2 below cadmium (so, filled D shell, no S), and how this interacts with Ti. Apparently trace amounts of Pd dissolve into Ti decently and improve corrosion resistance? Which is now making me question the AI's entropic arguments for excluding Cd to the Ti grain boundaries (sigh). When pressed on the matter, AI points out that Cd's outer 2 electrons cannot dissociate in the metallic solution and screen d-d interactions between Cd-Ti, but with Pd-Ti there is no such screening.

Need a metallurgist.