Titanium alloy melting technology. Developed cold bed furnace smelting technology, including electron beam cold bed furnace and plasma cold bed furnace technology. At present, the smelting of the cold bed furnace has reached a commercial level, which can melt ingots weighing up to 25 tons. It can produce high-quality titanium and titanium alloy ingots without segregation and inclusions to meet the demand for high-performance titanium materials for aviation rotating parts; it can produce flat ingots and hollow ingots, simplify the subsequent processing of plates and large pipes, and can recover a large amount of residual Titanium, but it has the problems of high cost and complicated operation. Electron beam and plasma cold bed smelting processes have developed rapidly in industrial developed countries such as the United States and Japan. Electron beams have been successfully applied to the smelting of pure titanium and TC4 alloys. Plasma beams are the most effective means of smelting complex titanium alloys. Russia has developed a smelting technology similar to a cold bed furnace, namely “condensation shell-consumable electrode melting”. In addition, the cold crucible smelting technology has also been greatly developed recently. It is used in the precision casting of titanium castings in combination with the centrifugal casting process. Currently, the second generation cold crucible smelting furnace is being manufactured. The second-generation cold crucible furnace can greatly improve the melting capacity, shorten the melting time, achieve complete suspension melting, and eliminate metal condensation. China has included research on induction melting shell smelting technology as a key research project, and has also made great progress in the smelting technology of titanium alloys. In 2008, China produced a total of 34,000 tons of titanium ingots and 24,000 tons of titanium processed materials; net export of sponge titanium 4450 tons; net export of titanium processed materials 4083 tons, becoming a net exporter of sponge titanium and titanium processed materials.
