Puris signs deal with NASA to produce alloy with greater wear and corrosion resistance

December 10, 2015 - Puris LLC’s latest alloy, SM-103, offers lower residual stress than other 60NiTi alloys. The titanium producer signed a limited, partially exclusive term license agreement with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Glenn Research Center, Cleveland.

Testing by NASA found that SM-103 has a better response to heat treatment and processing and provides both improved wear-and corrosion-resistant properties—two usually mutually exclusive properties that are hard to find together in one alloy. “Favorable load-bearing properties make it well suited to industrial bearing and precision bearing applications,” according to Puris, based in Bruceton Mills, West Virginia.

"SM-103 was developed by NASA over the past three to four years,” Puris CEO Craig Kirsch tells Modern Metals. “[The agency] chose Puris as its partner to bring the product to commercial markets in part due to our past successful record together and in part to their confidence in our high-quality processes for producing extremely clean powder."

NASA’s test report, “Resilient and Corrosion-Proof Rolling Element Bears Made from Superelastic Ni-Ti Alloys for Aerospace Mechanism Applications,” states, “The combination of high hardness, moderate elastic modulus, large recoverable strain, low density and intrinsic corrosion immunity provide a path to bearings largely impervious to shock load damage. It is anticipated that bearings and components made from alloys with such attributes can alleviate many problems encountered in advanced aerospace applications.”

The alloy will be used for applications such as wind turbines, turbochargers, aircraft engines, gears and valves. Kirsch also anticipates strong demand for the alloy for use in precision bearings as well as new applications. 

"The material is superelastic, so it can recover large amounts of strain compared to steel, for example,” says Kirsch. MM

For more on Puris and metal purity, revisit this titanium feature from April 2015 >