Rheological assessment of titanium MIM feedstocks [Conference paper]

Abstract

Titanium is an exciting structural material that can offer significant strength-to-weight advantages over currently used alloys. However its Achilles heel is its cost energy intensive production process that effectively eliminates it from competing with aluminium and high strength steels, apart from those critical applications where the metal forms only a small component of the total cost. Current attempts are being made to reduce the cost of titanium products and these recognise the importance of minimising the cost over the total production chain. Powder metallurgy technologies play a crucial role within this, as the output of the existing and potential primary metal production methods is in the form of sponge or powder. By using PM costly resmelting and forming operations can be avoided, except for large components. This paper describes the use of capillary rheometry to characterise the influence of temperature and shear rates on the flow behaviour of potential binder systems for titanium MIM feedstock.