Additive Manufacturing of Titanium Alloys

Titanium alloys are used extensively in both aerospace and terrestrial applications and in medical industry. This chapter gives a number of applications in these areas. This is followed by a detailed account of the cost of titanium components in which it is concluded that a major cost of these components is a result of the high cost of machining titanium, so that any way of reducing the machining by fabricating net or near-net shapes will reduce the cost of titanium parts. Major efforts have been directed to the use of powder metallurgy as one near-net approach, and this book is directed towards one powder metallurgy technique: additive manufacturing (AM). This chapter presents an overview of AM including a history of the evolution of this technique which dates back almost 100 years. The basic concept can be divided into a number of approaches of which four involve metal processing: directed energy deposition, powder bed fusion, sheet lamination, and binder jetting; and only the first three of these four have been used for processing titanium and its alloys.