Institute of Metals Division - Discussion: Phase Relations in the Titanium-Aluminum System

A. J. Goldak and J. Gordon Parr (University of Alberta) —While we appreciate the difficulties involved in any investigation of this system, and we wish to congratulate the authors on their comprehensive efforts, there are several aspects of their paper that are not clear to us. 1) If the 6 phase is, in fact, isomorphous with Ti3Sn, it should not be designated Ti,Al. An 4B structure cannot be isomorphous with an ordered structure of the DO type. Anderko et al.' suggested that the structure be called Ti3A1, and we believe this to be a more reasonable designation. The confusion is compounded when the authors designate the phase Ti3Al—yet the composition limits of this phase (according to their diagram) are approximately Ti,A1 and Ti,Al. Further, while Pietro-kowsky is said to have pointed out that the structure of the 6 phase is isomorphous with Ti3Sn, we understand that this was only a suggestion that was not confirmed. Margolin and Ence do not appear to have presented any evidence to support the suggested isomorphism. 2) In referring to the precipitation observed microscopically during the initial breakdown of high A1 a during quenching, the authors state that "such precipitation is not likely to be detected by Debye-Scherrer techniques". We suspect that if the precipitate was visible by optical microscopy, it must have at least one dimension of the order of 1 or greater, and would therefore be readily detected by diffraction techniques. 3) The authors state: "The basis for this suggestion (that 6 forms peritectically P + L—6) is the observation that the ,'3 + 6 and 6 phase fields were