Titanium Powder

MPP interest in titanium/titanium alloy powder development has its origins in work in this area by its sister company PSI.  The technology used is so called “cold crucible”

This technique is used to melt reactive materials with high melting points (>1600°C). The material is placed in a crucible consisting of water-cooled copper segments.

The crucible is placed in an inductor. This method, also known as levitation melting is being used to develop special metals that are free from contamination.

Schematic of cold crucible melting and bottom pouring

PSI collaborative research programme TiPOW to create additive material for aerospace

PSI is a key partner in a 3 year, £ 3.1m, collaborative research programme to develop titanium powder specifically formulated and blended to meet the needs of additive manufacturing (AM) of aerospace components. The programme, called TiPOW (Titanium Powder for net-shape component manufacture) involves developing the techniques and equipment that will produce the powder consistently, in quantity and at a lower price than currently available in the material supply chain.  A variety of low cost materials are being investigated as potential sources of feedstock.

The TiPOW programme is backed by the UK’s Aerospace Technology Institute (ATI) and the countries innovation agency, Innovate UK. Consortium partners include UK companies GKN Aerospace, Metalysis, and the University of Leeds.  As programme leader, GKN’s Aerospace business will also draw on the expertise of the GKN Powder Metallurgy division a world-leading supplier of metal powders and precision engineered components.

Although the inspiration for the programme was low-cost Ti 6/4 grades, the technology will apply equally to more complex titanium alloys and the clean melting techniques will be of interest to users of superalloy powders, nickel-titanium shape memory alloys and indeed any metal powders that are required to be ceramic inclusion-free.

Novel titanium alloy compositions

A continuous casting facility is used to produce titanium alloy compositions (ingots) that are novel or commercially unavailable.  This material is then used as feedstock and melted in a cold crucible and gas atomised into powder.

Further developments

Many companies throughout the World are investigating different technologies to produce titanium powders from a variety of different feedstock inputs.  The source of these inputs is varied and comes from a number of different production processes.  We have shown that the cold crucible processing route has a refining effect with regards to removing unwanted impurities in the feedstock materials.