Processing of Elemental Titanium by Powder Metallurgy Techniques

Titanium is characterised by an outstanding combination of properties like high strength, low density, good corrosion resistance and biocompatibility. Nonetheless, widespread employment of titanium at the industrial level, especially in the automotive industry, has not been achieved yet because of its high extraction and production costs. Consequently, titanium finds applications mainly in high demanding sectors, such as the aerospace industry or to produce biomedical devices, where the final high cost is not the principal issue. The processing of titanium and its alloys by means of powder metallurgy (PM) techniques is claimed to be a suitable way to reduce the fabrication cost of titanium products as well as offering the possibility to design new alloys which are difficult to obtain using the conventional metallurgical route, for example due to segregation of heavy alloying elements. This work deals with the processing of hydride-dehydride elemental titanium powder by means of different PM methods and aims at investigating the processing of near net-shape, chemically-homogeneous and fine-grained titanium-based components. In particular, properties achievable (i.e. relative density, microstructure and mechanical properties) and problems related to the processing of elemental titanium, by both the conventional PM route of pressing and sintering and the advanced PM method of hot-pressing, are presented.