Coogee Titanium’s MeltFree Continuous Titanium and Titanium Alloy Powder Development

Additive manufacturing, enabled by powder metals, is stepping-up with innovations that lowers cost while improving part performance, reduces development time, and shortening cycle time.

Producing low-cost titanium alloy directly from chemicals has been worked on for many years. Processes advanced but did not crossed the development chasm to become a viable production process. After a decade of development, Coogee Titanium, located near Perth, Australia has built a production facility. The facility incorporates numerous breakthroughs including:

• reducing titanium tetrachloride and elemental chlorides, when producing alloy powder, in a 200T fluidized bed reactor with magnesium in a Kroll-like reaction,
• continuous vacuum distillation of the reductant particles to titanium metal or fully alloyed titanium powder,
• production of low-oxygen magnesium powder for the reduction process, and
• powder with oxygen levels complying with grade 23 or grade 5.

The sum of these innovations is the production of CP and alloy titanium powder without the lengthy, energy consuming, and costly processes of making sponge, master alloys, multiple melting, hotworking, and cold drawing, in the case of atomization from wire.

This presentation will discuss Coogee Titanium’s:

• facility and processes,
• production of MeltFree Ti 6-4 and 6-4 Eli irregular shaped and spherical powder,
• alloy development capabilities (TiAl), and
• commercialization strategies.

MeltFree continuous processing promises to lower cost, facilitating the growth of titanium alloy powder applications for years to come.