In the first of six sessions focussing on advances in titanium PM at MPIF’s PowderMet 2011 conference (San Francisco, May 18-21), an extremely comprehensive review was given by James Sears, Quad City Manufacturing Laboratory, USA of the range of Additive Manufacturing (AM) technologies now being increasingly applied to the building of components from titanium alloy powders.

Dr David Whittaker reports exclusively for ipmd.net on this presentation.

Dr Sears began by categorising this broad range of additive manufacturing (AM) processes as:

“Powder bed” methods – these processes generally involve the building of parts layer-by-layer by rastering an energy beam onto a bed of metal powder. The beam can be either a laser beam or an electron beam. A further, recent entrant in this category of process was identified as ultrasonic consolidation.

Metal deposition methods – these range from those that have developed from arc welding processes (Gas Tungsten Arc Welding, Gas Metal Arc Welding, Plasma Transferred Arc Welding) to deposition technologies involving the use of lasers or electron beams to melt the feedstock material.

Spark Plasma Sintering (SPS) – essentially, SPS is a variant of hot-pressing but with the important difference that the heating rates are much higher thus enabling the production of microstructures and materials not possible with conventional processing.