The Production of Titanium Alloy Powder

Titanium alloy powder provides manufacturing variants to produce a variety of titanium intermediate materials and final products. However, titanium alloy powder is quite expensive at fifteen to thirty times the cost of sponge thus limiting the utilization of titanium powder to produce titanium products. The standard state-of-the-art processing to produce alloy powder results in very high cost of alloy powder. Three new processes have been demonstrated to produce titanium alloy powder at a cost of only 2-5 times the typical cost of sponge. The processes are (1) one step melting of sponge/alloying and gas blowing alloy powder, (2) metallothermic reduction of mixed chloride precursors to produce alloy powder and (3) electrolytic reduction in a fused salt of mixed alloying (TiCl4-AlCl3-VCl4) chlorides. These processes have beeSubscript textn demonstrated to produce low cost titanium alloy powder which can serve as feeds for the variant manufacturing processes to produce low cost titanium products.