metals Review A Review of Metastable Beta Titanium Alloys R. Prakash Kolli 1,* ID and Arun Devaraj 2 1 Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA 2 Physical and Computational Sciences Directorate, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, WA 99354, USA;
[email protected] * Correspondence:
[email protected]; Tel.: +1-301-405-5217; Fax: 301-405-6327 Received: 21 May 2018; Accepted: 25 June 2018; Published: 30 June 2018 Abstract: In this article, we provide a broad and extensive review of beta titanium alloys. Beta titanium alloys are an important class of alloys that have found use in demanding applications such as aircraft structures and engines, and orthopedic and orthodontic implants. Their high strength, good corrosion resistance, excellent biocompatibility, and ease of fabrication provide significant advantages compared to other high performance alloys. The body-centered cubic (bcc) b-phase is metastable at temperatures below the beta transus temperature, providing these alloys with a wide range of microstructures and mechanical properties through processing and heat treatment. One attribute important for biomedical applications is the ability to adjust the modulus of elasticity through alloying and altering phase volume fractions. Furthermore, since these alloys are metastable, they experience stress-induced transformations in response to deformation. The attributes of these alloys make them the subject of many recent studies. In addition, researchers are pursuing development of new metastable and near-beta Ti alloys for advanced applications. In this article, we review several important topics of these alloys including phase stability, development history, thermo-mechanical processing and heat treatment, and stress-induced transformations.