Application Of Titanium Materials in Marine Engineering
Titanium is a material with excellent physical properties and stable chemical properties. Titanium and its alloys have high strength, low specific gravity, and are resistant to seawater corrosion and ocean temperature corrosion, which can well meet people's application requirements in marine engineering. After years of efforts by titanium industry professionals and marine engineering application researchers, titanium has been widely used in marine oil and gas development, port construction, coastal power stations, seawater desalination, ships, marine fisheries and marine thermal energy conversion. Now, titanium for marine engineering has become one of the main areas of titanium civilian use. The specific applications of titanium materials in marine engineering are:
1. Marine oil and gas development:
The offshore drilling platform is a working base for implementing submarine oil and gas exploration and development, marking the improvement of the technical level of submarine oil and gas development. Marine oil production equipment mainly includes oil production platforms and ancillary equipment, including crude oil coolers, oil production risers, pumps, valves, joints and clamps. These equipment are in contact with media such as sulfides, ammonia, and chlorine in seawater and crude oil.
2. Port construction:
The titanium material has an oxide film with a thickness of no more than 10nm on its surface, which is very stable in a corrosive environment and has excellent corrosion resistance to the atmosphere, seawater and marine environment. It is currently the raw material that can best adapt to various marine environments.
3. Coastal power stations:
The comprehensive utilization of seawater is one of the important projects in marine engineering. The condenser of the coastal power station is a device that uses a large amount of seawater. The titanium used in the coastal power station is mainly titanium used in the condenser. Since the condenser uses seawater as cooling water, and the seawater contains a large amount of sediment, suspended matter, marine organisms and various corrosive substances, the situation is more serious in salt water where seawater and river water alternate. Traditional condensers use copper alloy tubes, which are often severely damaged due to various corrosion in seawater. Titanium has good corrosion resistance in seawater, especially in polluted seawater, and its high-speed erosion corrosion resistance is particularly outstanding.
4. Seawater desalination device:
From the development of seawater desalination at home and abroad, there are mainly two methods: distillation and reverse osmosis. The former is to heat seawater to vaporize it, and then condense the steam to obtain fresh water. The latter is to pressurize seawater so that the fresh water in it passes through a special membrane, intercepting the salt and obtaining fresh water. Early seawater desalination devices used copper alloys, carbon steel and other materials. Because these materials are not resistant to seawater corrosion and have low production efficiency, they were soon replaced by titanium with excellent seawater corrosion resistance. In seawater desalination, the main application of titanium is the heat transfer tube of the heater of the desalination device.
5. Ships:
The application of titanium in ships has attracted much attention. The navies and shipbuilding industries of various countries also attach great importance to the application research of titanium in ships and have developed many grades of marine titanium alloys. Titanium and its alloys are widely used in ships, such as hull structural parts, deep-sea survey ships and submarine pressure-resistant hulls, pipes, valves, rudders, shaft frames, accessories, propellers and propeller shafts in power drive devices, heat exchangers, coolers, hull sonar guide covers, etc.
6. Marine fisheries: Marine fisheries have shifted from fishing to breeding, and fish such as lionfish, flounder, and eels have been artificially bred. In artificial breeding technology, titanium metal mesh and titanium tube heat exchangers that maintain a certain seawater temperature are widely used.
7. Ocean thermal energy conversion: The ocean contains huge energy, such as tidal energy, wave energy, temperature difference energy, ocean current energy, salinity difference energy, etc. With the increasing shortage of world energy, people will be more interested in the development and utilization of ocean energy. Temperature difference power generation and tidal power generation projects have been studied and developed. The principle of thermoelectric power generation is to use the higher temperature seawater on the ocean surface to gasify ammonia or Freon, drive the turbine to rotate and generate electricity, and then use the low temperature seawater in the deep sea to cool the gasified ammonia or Freon, forming a continuously circulating heat engine system.
