Titanium alloy has the characteristics of high specific strength, good corrosion resistance, and excellent high-temperature mechanical properties. It can meet the needs of aerospace parts design featured by high mobility, high reliability, and long life. Its application level has become an important symbol to measure the advanced level of aerospace and spacecraft material selection, At the same time, titanium alloy has good biocompatibility and its elastic modulus is close to that of human bone. It is also an important application material in the medical field. Although titanium has many excellent characteristics, its processing has always been a difficult problem. The low thermal conductivity, work hardening, and low elastic modulus of titanium make it difficult to manufacture titanium components by traditional machining methods, with low material utilization, long cycle, and high cost, It is difficult to overcome the bottleneck problems of high oxygen content and porosity by spark plasma sintering.
As a new direction of the Near Net Shape Technique, additive manufacturing greatly reduces the process and shortens the manufacturing cycle. It is very suitable for the manufacturing of complex structures and customized parts, Moreover, the material utilization rate is high, and its technical advantages naturally meet the needs of the titanium application field, At the same time, additive manufacturing can avoid the processing problems of titanium. Titanium is not conducive to traditional machinings, such as low thermal conductivity but conducive to powder laser forming, Therefore, since the rise of metal additive manufacturing technology, titanium alloy has been first put into use and spread rapidly, which also drives the demand for powder materials. At present, the annual consumption of titanium powder for additive manufacturing in the world is more than 1000 tons, which still occupies the main market in the whole additive manufacturing metal materials.
