China masters fatigue-resistant tech for chopper rotors
It's not like they are fond of propaganda or anything
Seems quite plausible, the Russians have world class metallurgy and have been using titanium rotor hubs for a long while.
Claim is doubled fatigue life, no fine print details however.
Twenty five years ago I was working in durability testing in the car industry. We had fatigue resistant tech back then; it was called "steel".
Steel has a really interesting characteristic few other materials exhibit; it has a fatigue limit; a stress below which repeated cycles cause no fatigue damage regardless of the number of cycles. This makes it really useful for things like wheel studs and crankshafts and so on, which obviously experience millions of cycles within quite a short time. It's the reason we still build car bodies from steel rather than aluminium for example.
According to Wikipedia (font of all dubious knowledge!), titanium alloys may also exhibit the same property, which is presumably what the Chinese are working on. Not saying they've achieved it yet, but don't discount the possibility!
Steel has a really interesting characteristic few other materials exhibit; it has a fatigue limit; a stress below which repeated cycles cause no fatigue damage regardless of the number of cycles. This makes it really useful for things like wheel studs and crankshafts and so on, which obviously experience millions of cycles within quite a short time. It's the reason we still build car bodies from steel rather than aluminium for example.
According to Wikipedia (font of all dubious knowledge!), titanium alloys may also exhibit the same property, which is presumably what the Chinese are working on. Not saying they've achieved it yet, but don't discount the possibility!
