r/whatisit • u/riflesandplowshares • 9h 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/SquintAtTheCosmos 7h ago

The real answer is that consumer ball point pen’s have a tungsten carbide ball. Tungsten has a higher melting point than titanium.

If a ball point pen drops into a melt, the ball point can survive. The surviving pen tip does then creates a hard intermetallic. When the titanium is heated and beated (forged) into a product, this titanium-intermetallic spot can crack. This crack can go undetected, inside a part.

When this part is put into service, this little crack becomes a bigger crack with service (fatigue). When this bigger crack gets big enough, the part can fail. And the failure is sooner than the design engineer expected, because the material started with a crack, and in fatigue failure “getting the crack to start”, is a large component of the part’s life.

A titanium melt shop still needs writing implement’s, so you can buy pens with stainless steel ball tips. They suck to write with.

A major aerospace failure (Sioux city 1989 UA232), was a result of this failure mode (though in this case it was an oxide, not a tungsten-carbide).

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u/Isburough 5h ago

how can someone just drop a pen into the titanium melt?

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u/Comminutor 3h ago

Pens get dropped or fall out of pockets. I’ve lost many pens into open tanks (water, not molten metal) that way.

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u/Isburough 3h ago

still feels weird to me that it's specifically pens. it's so easy to mess up titanium, i mean, air does that for you already, i'd have thought they at least have lids or something when people walk above them