MECHANICAL PROPERTIES OF OPEN-CELL TITANIUM AND TITANIUM ALLOY FOAMS MADE BY PM PROCESS

摘要

Unlike the traditional powder metallurgy (PM) process which has typically aimed at achieving highly densified components, this paper reports the results for a highly porous structure - the open-cell metal foam - made by a PM process and intended for manufacture of orthopedic implants.In recent years, various efforts have been made to develop high porosity open-cell metal foams as surface coatings to replace sintered bead and fiber-metal porous coatings or plasma sprayed titanium surfaces on dense orthopedic implant substrates or to make entirely porous implants. In this study, the mechanical properties are reported for titanium and titanium alloy foams that were fabricated using a PM process with the space holder technology. The sintered metal foams have high porosities of 65～75% with compressive and flexural mechanical properties between those of cancellous and cortical bone, making them suitable for the manufacture of orthopedic implants.