Inexpensive Free-Form Fabrication of Titanium-Alloy Parts

Alloy/binder powder mixtures are deposited by 3D-printing machinery, then sintered.

A continuing effort to devise relatively inexpensive means of manufacturing titanium-alloy parts has been focused on a free-form fabrication approach. As used here, “free-form fabrication” refers generally to any or all of a number of methods and processes denoted, variously, as rapid prototyping or three-dimensional (3D) printing.