Over the last two decades there has been an increased interest in understanding the influence of trace boron additions in Ti alloys. These additions refine the prior β grain size in as-cast Ti alloys along with increasing their modulus and yield strength due to the precipitation of TiB. TiB also acts as a heterogeneous nucleation site for α precipitation and has been shown to influence the α phase morphology. B is completely soluble in liquid Ti but has a negligible solubility in both body centered cubic β and hexagonal close packed α phases of Ti. Thus, during solidification of hypoeutectic B containing alloys, B is rejected from β into the liquid where it reacts with Ti to form pristine single crystal whiskers of TiB. Despite a substantial amount of reported experimental work on the characterization of TiB precipitates, its formation mechanism and influence on α phase precipitation are still not clear. The current work is divided into two parts – (i) understanding the mechanism of TiB formation using first principles based density functional theory (DFT) calculations and (ii) elucidating how TiB influences the α phase morphology and crystallography in titanium alloys using electron microscopy techniques. TiB exhibits anisotropic growth morphology with [010] direction as its predominant growth direction and displays a hexagonal cross section with (100), (101), and (10) as the bounding planes. A high density of stacking faults has been experimentally observed on the (100) plane. The present study, by using DFT based nudged elastic band (NEB) calculations, elucidates for the first time that the diffusion of B through TiB is via an interstitial-assisted mechanism as opposed to vacancy-assisted mechanism hypothesized in literature. This one dimensional interstitial-assisted diffusion results in the anisotropic growth of TiB. In addition, the energetics of TiB- α interfaces was calculated to understand the hexagonal cross-section of TiB. The intimate mixing of B27 and Bf structures and their co-existence with stacking faults has been explained by calculating the interfacial energy of B27/Bf interfaces along with stacking fault formation energy. The boride precipitates have also been shown to modify the morphology of α phase from lath like to more equiaxed like. However, the influence of TiB on the crystallography of α precipitation has not been explored in great detail. The present study will clearly demonstrate, for the first time, the influence of various alloying elements present in the titanium alloy, on the resulting effect of B addition on α morphology and its crystallography in Ti alloys. Thus, the influence of B addition on α precipitation in two classes of commercial Ti alloys, i.e. β alloys and α + β alloys have been explored. It has been found that TiB nucleated α can either become equiaxed by a loss of Burgers orientation relationship (OR) with β or can retain the lath morphology in case of alloys containing a combination of Ti, Al and Mo.

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