Designing against phase and property heterogeneities in additively manufactured titanium alloys

Additive manufacturing (AM) creates digitally designed parts by successive addition of material. However, owing to intrinsic thermal cycling, metallic parts produced by AM almost inevitably suffer from spatially dependent heterogeneities in phases and mechanical properties, which may cause unpredictable service failures. Here, we demonstrate a synergistic alloy design approach to overcome this issue in titanium alloys manufactured by laser powder bed fusion. The key to our approach is in-situ alloying of Ti-6Al-4V (in weight per cent) with combined additions of pure titanium powders and iron oxide (Fe₂O₃) nanoparticles. This not only enables in-situ elimination of phase heterogeneity through diluting V concentration whilst introducing small amounts of Fe, but also compensates for the strength loss via oxygen solute strengthening. Our alloys achieve spatially uniform microstructures and mechanical properties which are superior to those of Ti-6Al-4V. This study may help to guide the design of other alloys, which not only overcomes the challenge inherent to the AM processes, but also takes advantage of the alloy design opportunities offered by AM.