Fabrication of ultra-low-cost pure Ti by selective laser melting using the mixed powders of hydride-dehydride titanium powders treated by ball milling and spherical powders

Abstract

Selective laser melting (SLM) currently uses the micro-fine spherical powder prepared by gas atomisation as a raw material. However, the spherical powder is expensive. In order to reduce the cost, this study first ball mills the pure titanium (CP-Ti) powder of hydrogenation-dehydrogenation (HDH). At a high speed and within a short period, the particle size distribution of the powder at a high rotation speed for 15 min is 12-45 μm with an angle of repose 34.3°. Then, the ball milling of titanium was mixed spherical powder with a wide grain size range up to 100 μm. This study presents the results of using SLM to produce CP-Ti parts starting from powder with mixed powder, in a different ratio between modified powder and spherical powder. The ultimate tensile strength (UTS) of SLM-parts of 8:2 ratio has been improved to 507 MPa, and the UTS of parts of 7:3 ratio has been improved to 522 MPa.

Comparative Life Cycle Assessment and Cost Analysis of the Production of Ti6Al4V-TiC Metal–Matrix Composite Powder by High-Energy Ball Milling and Ti6Al4V Powder by Gas Atomization

“…Electron Beam Powder Bed Fusion was used by Narra et al [59] to successfully print parts from Ti6Al4V HDH powder compared with spherical atomized powder, obtaining similar qualities. In other work by X. Yang et al [60], irregular HDH titanium was modified in an HEBM to fabricate parts by Selective Laser Melting, reducing in this way the cost of using high-purity spherical powder, similar to the results achieved by Hou et al [61] manipulating HDH Ti by ball milling technology to produce printable Ti powders for the same AM technology. In addition, other kind of techniques, such as the disproportionation reaction in molten NaCl-KCl, have demonstrated the production of powders from titanium sponge [62].…”