from the conferences organized by TANGER Ltd.
Additive manufacturing offers great potential for producing metal parts with a high degree of geometrical complexity and high mechanical properties. However, the number of alloys in the form of powder material that can be applied in these technologies are limited at the moment. A solution for this problem might be found by utilizing a mechanical mixture of elemental powders for manufacturing parts by laser additive manufacturing which would result in the in-situ synthesis of the required alloy. This work presents the results of the study of the in-situ synthesis of Ti-5Al, Ti-6Al-7Nb and Ti-22Al-25Nb alloys by laser additive manufacturing, i.e. selective laser melting (SLM) from elemental powders. Titanium, aluminum, and niobium powder particles were used as initial powders, which were mechanically mixed to prepare powder mixtures of the corresponding alloys. It was shown that SLM technology can be successfully utilized to synthesize α-titanium Ti-5Al alloy from elemental powders with homogeneous chemical composition and high mechanical properties. In order to fully dissolve niobium particles and achieve a homogeneous chemical composition and microstructure of Ti-6Al-7Nb and Ti-22Al-25Nb alloys heat treatment of bulk samples after SLM is required. The microstructure, phase composition of the obtained material before and after different heat treatments were studied, also the mechanical properties of the obtained alloys were investigated.
Keywords: Additive manufacturing, selective laser melting, titanium alloys, in-situ synthesis© This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.