Development of MELD Deposited Ti64 Material for Structural Applications

The ability to utilize metal additive technologies to produce titanium components for large structural applications is of high interest across many industries due to the potential savings in raw material, lead-time, and finish machining. Traditional additive manufacturing processes that rely on melting the added feedstock are currently non-viable technologies for larger scale components due to the cost of fabrication, resultant microstructure, and/or the shear-size of the components. In this work, a solid-state additive technology, MELD, is used to fabricate components using off-the shelf Ti64 solid feedstock. The MELD process is a large-scale, solid-state, thermo-mechanical AM process that yields fully dense material with no requirement of post deposition material-processing such as HIP or sintering, etc. During the MELD process, filler material is forced to flow between the rotating MELD tool and the substrate, whereby the filler material undergoes severe plastic deformation, dynamic recrystallization, and deposition. In this presentation, an overview of the development of the MELD process for titanium alloys will be presented (pure titanium, titanium aluminides, Ti64, and Ti6242) will be provided. Specific activity around the development of Ti64 for structural components, including a discussion on key processing parameters, microstructure, chemical analysis, and mechanical properties, will be presented.