Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and industry partners are developing a non-melt consolidation process that could reduce the amount of energy required and the cost to make titanium parts from powders by up to 50%, making it feasible to use titanium alloys for brake rotors, artificial joint replacements and armor for military vehicles. The non-melt approach includes roll compaction for directly fabricating sheets from powder, and press and sinter techniques to produce net shape components and extrusion. Instead of using conventional melt processing to produce products from titanium powder, with the new method the powders remain in their solid form during the entire procedure. This saves energy required for processing, reduces the amount of scrap and allows for new alloys and engineered composites. While powder metallurgy has been used to produce components for many years, titanium products have not widely been fabricated using these methods because of the high cost of conventional titanium powders. Now, however, new low-cost titanium powders are enabling ORNL, International Titanium Powders, Ametek, and BAE Systems to develop these technologies for titanium. In coming years, researchers expect lightweight corrosion-resistant titanium alloys to make their way into many other products.
