Titanium and stainless steel are traditional metals that are often used in today’s manufacturing industry. These two metals are inherently exquisite and both possess their own unique set of properties and strength. Consequently, a knowledge of both titanium and stainless steel can go a long way in achieving your goal on your project. We have selected this complete guide to help you differentiate between both metals.
Let’s compare 17 differences between titanium and stainless steel
Titanium and stainless steel exhibit excellent characteristics that differentiate them from each other. For ease of understanding, we will make a comparison between titanium and stainless steel using different properties. These properties include elemental composition, corrosion resistance, electrical conductivity, thermal conductivity, melting point, hardness, weight, and many more.
Titanium vs Stainless Steel: Element Composition
The composition of the elements is a characteristic that can be used to differentiate between titanium and stainless steel. By comparison, commercially pure titanium contains a variety of elements including nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, iron, and nickel. Having titanium as the main element of composition, other elements vary in composition between 0.013 and 0.5 in percentage.
Stainless steel, on the other hand, is made up of compositional varieties of elements with 11% chromium, as well as other elements with percentage composition ranging from 0.03% to more than 1.00%. The chromium content of stainless steel helps prevent rust and also provides heat resistant characteristics. These elements include aluminum, silicon, sulfur, nickel, selenium, molybdenum, nitrogen, titanium, copper, and niobium.
Titanium vs Stainless Steel: Corrosion Resistance
When it comes to applications related to corrosion, there is a term called specialty metals. These specialty metals are highly corrosion resistant metals. In this context, specialty metals like titanium offer high corrosion resistance and mechanical stability where other metals like stainless steel and many others are unsuitable. Stainless steel materials offer excellent mechanical properties; however, its corrosion resistance is limited. This limitation is mainly found in concentrated acids at high temperatures.
Specialty metals like titanium are mostly attractive for use in corrosion-sensitive equipment in a variety of industries. In conclusion, titanium is more resistant to corrosion than stainless steel in a wide field, such as corrosion against alkalis, acids, natural waters and industrial chemicals.
Titanium vs stainless steel: electrical conductivity
Electrical conductivity involves the flow of electrons through a material due to a drop in potential. In addition, the atomic structure of said metal contributes strongly to its electrical conductivity. Compared to copper as a standard for measuring electrical conductivity, titanium is not a good conductor. It exhibits about 3.1% copper conductivity, while stainless steel has a 3.5% copper conductivity.
From another point of view of the electrical resistance, which is the opposition that a material exhibits to the flow of electrons. From this point of view, titanium has poor conductivity. As a result, titanium is a good resistance.
Conclusion
Titanium is a well-known metallic substance due to its high strength-to-weight ratio. It has many applications in the aerospace industry. Stainless steel is well known for its resistance to corrosion that is absent from other forms of steel. The main difference between titanium and stainless steel is that titanium is a metal while stainless steel is a metal alloy.
