Piston-based material extrusion of Ti-6Al-4V feedstock for complementary use in metal injection molding

Piston-based material extrusion enables cost savings for metal injection molding users when it is utilized as a complementary shaping process for green parts in small batch sizes. This, however, requires the use of series feedstock and the production of sufficiently dense green parts in order to ensure metal injection molding-like material properties. In this paper, a methodological approach is presented to identify material-specific process parameters for an industrially used Ti-6Al-4V metal injection molding feedstock based on the extrusion force. It was found that for an optimum extrusion temperature of 95 °C and printing speed of 8 mm/s an extrusion force of 1300 N ensures high-density green parts without under-extrusion. The resulting sintered part properties exhibit values comparable to metal injection molding in terms of part density (max. 99.1%) and tensile properties (max. yield strength: 933 MPa, max. ultimate tensile strength: 1000 MPa, max. elongation at break: 18.5%) depending on the selected build orientation. Thus, a complementary use could be demonstrated in principle for the Ti-6Al-4V feedstock.

Subjects

additive manufacturing

material extrusion

Ti-6Al-4V

feedstock

metal injection molding

green parts

DDC Class

600: Technik

620: Ingenieurwissenschaften

Funding Organisations

Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft und Energie - BMWi

More Funding Information

This research was funded by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy BMWi, grant number ZF4547817DE8.

Publication version

publishedVersion

Lizenz

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Name

materials-15-00351.pdf

Size

8.74 MB

Format

Adobe PDF

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Piston-based material extrusion of Ti-6Al-4V feedstock for complementary use in metal injection molding