Abstract:
Additive manufacturing (AM) new technologies are being widely applied for the fabrication of materials in different areas. For metallic materials, powder bed fusion technologies, including selective laser melting (SLM), are the most used. Due to its high flowability, it is common that the used raw material is spherical powder and not irregular powder. However, the production process of spherical powders is expensive. The Ti53Nb alloy is extensively employed on the fabrication of superconducting materials. Moreover, its high biocompatibility and low elastic modulus present a great potential for the fabrication of medical implants through SLM process. This work aims to compare SLM manufactured samples fabricated with spherical and irregular powders of the Ti53Nb alloy, by using the same parameters of power and scanning speed of the laser and different levels of oxygen inside the chamber of fabrication. To that end, measurements of density, hardness, oxygen and nitrogen of the samples were taken. It was also made a comparation among the different microstructures obtained on the process. It was found that the parameters to obtain fully dense samples depend on the powder’s morphologies and is possible to achieve high values of density, even with high values of oxygen.