Titanium Matrix Composites with High Specific Stiffness

Materials with specific stiffness value above 100 [GPa/(g/cm3)] are typically fiber‑reinforced materials. These materials suffer from the fact that they have anisotropic behavior which means high specific stiffness values can only be obtained in the direction parallel to the fiber. In order to obtain materials with a specific stiffness u003e60 in all directions, several Titanium based composites have been screened. Fillers based on B4C particles have been identified as most promising to reinforce a Titanium or Titanium alloy matrix for this purpose. For the manufacturing of the composites a rapid hot pressing technique (similar to Spark Plasma Sintering) was used. Besides the assessment and characterization of the Young´s Modulus and the hardness the impact of processing parameters on the microstructure was also investigated.