Titanium: One more potential advantage we have over Apollo? | Spacecraft Engineering Workgroup | Forum

Though expensive, titanium and alloys there of have excellent strength to weight ratios, are very resistant to heat and seem to be very good thermal insulators by the standards of metals, if the way my titanium spork reacts to hot soup is any indication. Neither Apollo, nor the shuttle used them structurally, probably because of the higher costs at the time. They are now extensively used in structural applications in high performance aircraft.

I think that we might want to use quit a bit of the stuff, particularly in areas that need to support a lot of weight or deal with heat. The structure of the SM where it attaches to the engine might be a natural application, for example. It is likely to be a net cost savings in some cases because it would lower the mass needed to withstand a given force and lifting things to orbit costs ridiculous amounts. The downsides are that it is less "back-yard-able" and harder to obtain than aluminium and steel.

What does everyone think?

http://www.matweb.com

This is a fantastic place to go to find material properties. It's the wikipedia for a materials database. We can find what we want, but we need to be careful because anybody can modify the values. It might be beneficial to register, because then we can do things like compare materials and I think export to programs such as Ansys.

If we want a complete way to choose materials, I suggest we go for some software by a company called Granta (http://www.grantadesign.com/pr…..ucts/ces/). I tried explaining this before. I took a course on materials selection and this is what we used. Basically we give it some inputs such as density, cost, elastic modulus and so forth, then a type of scatter plot is made and we make our selection based on some requirements we give. The downfall is that it does cost and I no longer have access to it. I don't know of any alternative to this.