International Titanium Association bestows Lifetime Achievement Award

Russell Gordon Sherman

The International Titanium Association (ITA), Eastlake, Colo., has announced Russell Gordon Sherman as the recipient of its 2018 Lifetime Achievement Award. Sherman developed alloys and heat-treating protocols for the titanium industry and pioneered the high-volume production of titanium aerospace fasteners.

Frauke Hogue, FASM (Fellow of American Society for Materials), an ITA educational instructor and an executive and metallographer with Hogue Metallography, Pacific Palisades, Calif., in a nomination form for the prestigious award, lauded Sherman’s distinguished career. “The entire titanium industry has benefited from Sherman’s research into developing a higher-strength titanium (the Ti-6Al-4V alloy) through the heat treatment of solution treating and aging,” Hogue wrote.

Sherman was involved in developing titanium alloys and heat-treating protocols to raise the mechanical properties and usability of the “wonder metal” during the formative years of the titanium industry, according to Hogue. He presented the initial findings from his research at Titanium Metals Corp. of America (Timet), Henderson, Nev., at the ASM’s convention in Philadelphia in October 1955 in a paper titled “The Heat Treatability of Ti-6Al-4V.” The backdrop to his research work came during the Cold War years of the 1950s, when the U.S. and the Soviet Union were vying for supremacy in aerospace.

Hogue also recalled that, later in Sherman’s career, during the 1960s and into the early 1970s, he worked in the industrial fastener industry where he pioneered high-volume production techniques and heat treating of titanium fasteners for the aerospace industry. This was a time when Boeing needed thousands of fasteners for its 747 commercial jet.

“One-at-a-time hot forging could not meet the volume and price demand (for aerospace fasteners),” Hogue stated. “He made volume production of fasteners possible by working out techniques (for titanium wire) using cold-heading equipment. Working with Egloff & Graper, he made volume heat treating of fasteners possible. This was done by modifying an old AGF Shaker hearth furnace to solution-treat fasteners continually under argon gas protection.”