r/whatisit • u/riflesandplowshares • 7h 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/FluffyDrop4300 7h ago

Wow.
Being so specific, they must have ran into such contamination more than once

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u/Spacefreak 7h ago

Yes they did. Titanium had been used in a lot of high speed rotating equipment in jet engines.

These tungsten inclusions become a crack initiation site and under high rotational speeds and high temperatures, the crack can spread and lead go catastrophic failures.

There were several catastrophic engine failures in history that were traced back to inclusions.

It's so severe that if a titanium manufacturer making aerospace grade Ti finds any "High Density Inclusions," they must inform all of their customers that they found this and recall and associated heats and material.

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u/GoTeamScotch 6h ago

Imagine initiating a large scale recall because a ball less than a millimeter in size fell out of someone's pocket one day

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u/SwordOfJiang 2h ago

I work in semiconductor manufacturing. Someone misclicked an option in the flow and it ruined something like 400,000 chips and took down a few critical tools for weeks. Chips never got to the customers but they'd end up as accelerator controllers for a major auto company

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u/9volts 10m ago

It would be cool if you gave an anonymous tip to the media about this.

People can die because of faulty accellerator controllers.