Sub-milimetric titanium parts generated by rapid prototyping based on laser cladding

Rapid Prototyping based on Laser Cladding is an Additive Manufacturing (AM) technique that can be applied to any material which can be melted. It can be found under different names and acronyms: Direct Laser Deposition (DLD), Laser Metal Deposition (LMD), Laser Engineering Net Shaping (LENS), etc. Despite the different names, the basics of these methods are the same: a scanning laser beam creates a molten pool, in which a precursor material is fed; by the relative movement between the substrate and the laser, a cladding track is generated; and by the overlapping of cladding tracks is possible to manufacture functional 3D parts, layer by layer. Apart from that, titanium and its alloys present excellent properties like corrosion resistance, biocompatibility and high strength-to-weight ratio. They are widely used by several industries, in particular for biomedical, chemical, aircraft and marine applications. However, the machinability of titanium is considered poor and the loss of material produced by conventional manufacturing methods is highly costly. Rapid Prototyping Based on Laser Cladding is a solution to manufacture functional parts of titanium and avoid these obstacles. In this research work, Rapid Prototyping based on Laser Cladding is applied to obtain sub-milimetric simple titanium parts. A fiber laser delivering a maximum power of 200 W is used to process the precursor material selected: commercial pure titanium (cp-Ti) powder. The parts generated are analyzed by different characterization methods to study the microstructure, composition and properties.