Mechanical evaluation of porous titanium (Ti6Al4V) structures with electron beam melting (EBM).

By Jayanthi Parthasarathy, Binil Starly, S. Raman, A. Christensen. Journal of The Mechanical Behavior of Biomedical Materials, 2010

785 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Patient specific porous implants for the reconstruction of craniofacial defects have gained importance due to their better performance over their generic counterparts. The recent introduction of electron beam melting (EBM) for the processing of titanium has led to a one step fabrication of porous custom titanium implants with controlled porosity to meet the requirements of the anatomy and functions at the region of implantation. This paper discusses an image based micro-structural analysis and the mechanical characterization of porous Ti6Al4V structures fabricated using the EBM rapid manufacturing process. SEM studies have indicated the complete melting of the powder material with no evidence of poor inter-layer bonding. Micro-CT scan analysis of the samples indicate well formed titanium struts and fully interconnected pores with porosities varying from 49.75%-70.32%. Compression tests of the samples showed effective stiffness values ranging from 0.57(+/-0.05)-2.92(+/-0.17)GPa and compressive strength values of 7.28(+/-0.93)-163.02(+/-11.98)MPa. For nearly the same porosity values of 49.75% and 50.75%, with a variation in only the strut thickness in the sample sets, the compressive stiffness and strength decreased significantly from 2.92 GPa to 0.57 GPa (80.5% reduction) and 163.02 MPa to 7.28 MPa (93.54 % reduction) respectively. The grain density of the fabricated Ti6Al4V structures was found to be 4.423 g/cm(3) equivalent to that of dense Ti6Al4V parts fabricated using conventional methods. In conclusion, from a mechanical strength viewpoint, we have found that the porous structures produced by the electron beam melting process present a promising rapid manufacturing process for the direct fabrication of customized titanium implants for enabling personalized medicine.

Subfields: Automotive Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f4d486a4e722b8fab5a6b27582d4a2aca2191150

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Citations in the corpus

Compression behavior of lattice structures produced by selective laser melting: X-ray tomography based experimental and finite element approaches (2018, result): “This conclusion is consistent with former studies discussing the effect of the volume fraction of solid phase [62, 63] and average struts thickness [64] on the mechanical properties of an open-cell cellular structure.”
Mechanical properties of open-cell metallic biomaterials manufactured using additive manufacturing (2013, neutral): “) had the same variation as reported in reference [13], the second FE model (FEM SD Max.”
Drop weight impact behaviour of sandwich panels with metallic micro lattice cores (2013, background): “[14] realised rectangular micro structures with a cell size of 2 mm and a strut diameter of 800 mm.”
Biocompatibility of Advanced Manufactured Titanium Implants—A Review (2014, background): “The mechanical properties and behaviour of titanium implants can be varied via the volume fraction and size distribution of the pore structures [19] and it has been shown that the elastic modulus of porous titanium decreases with increasing pore size under a compressive force [18].”
Electron Beam Additive Manufacturing of Titanium Components: Properties and Performance (2013, background): “A number of AM processes are currently available [1,2] and most studies performed on titanium, specifically Ti-6Al-4V, are defined by their heat source, such as electron beam [3–12], Laser [12–23] or Arc [21,22], and how the raw material is supplied, such as layers of powder where selected regions a”