Microstructure of an additively manufactured Ti-Ta-Al alloy using novel pre-alloyed powder feedstock material

Binary Ti-Ta and ternary Ti-Ta-Al alloys attracted considerable attention as new potential biomaterials and/or high-temperature shape memory alloys. However, conventional forming and manufacturing technologies of refractory based titanium alloys are difficult and cost-intensive, especially when complex shapes are required. Recently, additive manufacturing (AM) emerged as a suitable alternative and several studies exploited elemental powder mixing approaches to obtain a desired alloy and subsequently use it for complex shape manufacture. However, this approach has one major limitation associated with material inhomogeneities after fabrication. In present work, novel pre-alloyed powder material of a Ti-Ta-Al alloy was additively manufactured. Hereto, electron beam powder bed fusion (PBF-EB/M) technique was used for the first time to process such Ti-Ta based alloy system. Detailed microstructural analysis revealed that additively manufactured structures had a near full density and high chemical homogeneity. Thus, AM of pre-alloyed feedstock material offers great potential to overcome major roadblocks, even when significant differences in the melting points and densities of the constituents are present as proven in the present case study. The homogeneous microstructure allows to apply short-term thermal post treatments. The highly efficient process chain detailed will open up novel application fields for Ti-Ta based alloys.