Cold spraying titanium alloy

Cold Spray Additive Manufacturing is a particularly useful technology for manufacturing large parts, which are challenging for today‘s powder bed fusion based 3D printing processes due to equipment size limitations or protective atmosphere necessity, especially when depositing reactive materials such as Ti-6-4.

Until now, Ti-6Al-4V was considered one of the most challenging material for cold spray deposition due to the high critical velocities of the material to overcome during the deposition process, which resulted porosities in the Cold Spray deposits 3% and higher.

The recently developed unique combination of Cold Spray hardware, process parameters and post treatment procedure resulted in porosity levels < 0.2% and final mechanical properties exceeding the requirements given by the ASTM F3001, ISO 5832-3 and AMS 4930 standards.

In contrast to other additive manufacturing technologies, powder particles are not melted during the Cold Spray process. The bonding occurs due to plastic deformation. Unlike other common technologies such as laser, electron beam or wire-arc based processes, Cold Spraying does not require high temperatures. Therefore, it is possible to deposit components without the necessity of using any protective atmosphere, with almost no dimensional limitation, and in the absence of thermal residual stresses. The material efficiency from powder to deposit is more than 97%.

The Ti-6Al-4V alloy is typically used in marine and defence applications, for manufacturing aerospace structural parts, gas turbine components and biomedical implants and prostheses.