Microporous Structure Titanium Material

Titanium is widely used in human implantable medical products because of its good biocompatibility, bacteriostasis, high strength, light weight, corrosion resistance, and no heavy metal precipitation.

Recently, scientists from the United States, Japan, and South Korea have developed a new method to prepare titanium materials with three-dimensional microstructures. They first prepared a two-layer titanium hydride mesh by printing, then rolled the mesh into a cylinder and reduced it to titanium by partial vacuum sintering. This method gives us greater flexibility in controlling the shape and geometry of the material. Using this technique, the researchers fabricated meshed titanium rolls and characterized their microstructure and mechanical properties. The ink used for printing is composed of titanium hydride powder and a copolymer. The researchers measured the weight, diameter and height of the titanium coils before and after heat treatment to calculate the material's porosity. They also performed uniaxial compression tests on the material, measuring the strain and hardness of the material.

The experimental results show that this mesh structure obtains a very good fit of stiffness, hardness and plasticity. Orthogonal bilayer meshes are well sintered together. Micropores can be observed on the titanium fibers of each layer. As the particle size of the powder decreases, its sintering properties increase, while the porosity decreases.

Titanium with a microporous structure has two other advantages for implantation in the human body:

1. Reduce the rigidity of the material, thereby weakening the stress shielding effect;

Second, it can introduce bone growth and speed up the combination of the human body and the implant. Titanium for truss structures or microarrays combines high strength, low density, and excellent damage resistance.

As far as the current methods of preparing such materials are concerned, they mainly include replica precision casting, sintering of stacked wire arrays, or selective electron beam/laser sintering of titanium powder.

In the end, the researchers found that the preparation method of this new microstructured titanium material is not only suitable for titanium metal, but can also be perfectly extended to other practical metals by using this method, and can even be used for sinterable oxide-based ceramic materials.