The excellent biocompatible properties of porous titanium make it a popular choice for many biomedical applications, especially due to its high specific strength. This paper introduces a new method for manufacturing titanium foam, where titanium powder is sintered with sodium chloride as the space-holder. The process is capable of producing open-cell titanium foam with controlled cell morphology, cell size and porosity. The samples produced have spherical or angular cells with a cell size of 250 - 425 μm and different porosities of 60-80%. A range of processing conditions including sintering temperature have been investigated. Their effects on the quality of the final specimens, as determined by techniques including SEM, EDX and XPS, have been discussed. It has been found that additional sintering under vacuum produces higher quality samples. The manufacturing conditions can be varied to achieve optimum quality and cleanliness with this new manufacturing method.
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