Burning Titanium

Titanium alloys are hugely valuable and widely used for their combination of light weight and high strength. They also have good corrosion resistance thanks to the formation of a thin oxide scale. Curiously, density functional calculations show that this scale is not thermodynamically stable. We tried the line "its no use pointing at it, the computer says it isn't there", but this didn't wash well with our metallurgist colleagues. So we devised a non-equilibrium model to describe the process which, as these things do, turned out to be very similar to work by Sugden and Evans. In this talk I'll present the background to phase stability in titanium, corrosion resistance, the loss of corrosion resistance at high temperature, and the ultimate failure of corrosion resistance: burning.