Designer surfaces for titanium components

Despite their outstanding combination of properties, titanium and its alloys are very susceptible to severe adhesive wear in rubbing with almost all the engineering surfaces and can exhibit poor corrosion resistance in some aggressive environments. Surface engineering research centred at the University of Birmingham has been focused on creating designer surfaces for titanium components. Great progress has been made recently through the development of such novel surface engineering techniques as thermal oxidation, palladium-treated thermal oxidation, oxygen diffusion and duplex systems. Such advances thus provide scope for designer titanium components for a diversified range of engineering applications, usually as direct replacements for steel components. By way of example, some of our successful steps towards titanium designer surfaces are reported. To date, the potential of these novel techniques has been realised first in auto-sport and offshore industries.