Titanium alloy has extremely excellent properties, such as low density, corrosion resistance, high strength, high yield ratio, and so on. It is widely used in aviation, shipping, power station, medical and other fields. In recent years, the use of titanium plates has increased year by year, and its demand in various fields has increased significantly. For manufacturers, the problem is to tackle key technical problems in various demand fields.
Due to the high deformation resistance and narrow hot working temperature range of titanium plates, cracks are easy to occur during hot working, which increases the manufacturing difficulty. Small size titanium alloy plate generally refers to a plate with a thickness of less than 6 mm, which has a large market in aerospace and medical directions. In the case of a large market, customers also have relatively strict requirements for the organization and performance of their products. Therefore, the hot processing link should have the appropriate technology to obtain better organization and performance. The production process route of upsetting and drawing forging plus slab heating rolling is often adopted in the production of small-sized plates, but the organization is often not particularly optimized, and only the forging process will bring great differences.
Titanium alloy is a kind of difficult to deform the metal. Forging is particularly important in all hot processing links of titanium materials. Therefore, attention must be paid to the research and development of the slab forging process. In order to obtain the target microstructure and properties of titanium alloy forgings, it depends on the chemical composition and heat treatment of the alloy. On the other hand, the thermal parameters such as forging temperature range, deformation degree, and deformation speed also have a great impact on the microstructure and properties of titanium alloy forgings.
Casting forging methods are generally divided into three types: free forging, die forging, and upsetting and drawing forging. Die forging is a forging method to obtain forgings by forming blanks with dies on special die forging equipment, which is not suitable for slab production.
Compared with free forging, upsetting and drawing forging can greatly improve the internal structure of a slab, but in the production of small-size plates, too much optimization of structure in the early stage will make little improvement of structure in the subsequent rolling process. Therefore, through comparison, it is found that the slab obtained by free forging is more suitable for the production of Ti-6Al-4V titanium small-size plate, and its metallographic structure and comprehensive properties are better.
