Speaker
Description
Critical components made of high-performance materials subjected to fatigue
loads have extreme demands on qualification and production control. Additive
Manufacturing is now an increasingly important technology for implementation
of bionic lightweight designs.
Over recent years, a great deal of research work has been carried out on additively manufactured
grade 5/23 titanium (Ti6Al4V) in safety-critical applications such as aerospace, medical or car racing.
Lightweight designs bring about lower safety margins, which in turn create a need for high fatigue
strength together with a robust production process resulting in a very low standard deviation of
mechanical material properties.
Post-processing, mainly consisting of hot-isostatic pressing (HIP), heat treatment (HT) and surface
finishing, is an integral part of a robust production process and should be ideally tailored to a
particular alloy. This is especially interesting and rewarding in the case of such a widely-used and
well-researched alloy as Ti6Al4V, taking the best out of both the novel microstructure of the AM
process as well as of more established heat treatment methods known from forgings or castings.
High-pressure Heat Treatment (HPHT), developed by Quintus Technologies for combining traditional
HIP cycles with an integrated, subsequent inert gas quenching cycle is used with great advantage on
additively manufactured Ti6Al4V for maximizing the fatigue strength in a lean, fast and robust process.