Abstract
An economic drawback of powder based additive manufacturing methods is the high cost of powder compared to cast materials. However, the use of recycled materials, which do not originate from the primary powder production cycle, offers potential for cost reduction. In the present contribution, the use of Ti-6Al-4V powder generated via recycling is combined with Fused Granulate Fabrication FGF and MIM processing. The starting chip material comes from aviation production leftovers. The cleaned chips were formed into cylindrical electrodes and spherical powder was produced using the EIGA process. The tensile test properties of the parts made from the recycled Ti-6Al-4V powder were validated against parts produced from commercial plasma atomized Ti-6Al-4V powder. The parts produced from recycled powder show a higher oxygen content and therefore a higher tensile strength, but only a slightly lower plastic elongation to fracture, compared to parts made from plasma atomized powder. © European Powder Metallurgy Association (EPMA)
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