Titomic
Titomic Formnext stand
Titomic at Formnext 2018
Amidst talk of the biggest metal additive manufacturing system in the world and bicycle frames being built and finished in under 30 minutes, is a company that, when you pull back the curtain, is indulging in plenty of action too.
Titomic is what happens when a government wants to make better use of its rich titanium reserves - a fashion generated by widespread industrial use of the material - and the national research organisation (CSIRO) develops a patented manufacturing technology able to process it.
Those reserves, per the U.S. Geological Survey 2014, include 24,000 million metric tonnes of rutile, the most common titanium dioxide mineral, and 160,000 million metric tonnes of ilmenite, a titanium-iron oxide mineral – respectively the largest and second-largest totals in the world. The industrial use spans the aerospace, automotive, defence, marine, and consumer goods sectors. And the technology is a cold spray process being marketed as Titomic Kinetic Fusion (TKF) after CSIRO licensed it exclusively to the Melbourne-based vendor.
Instead of exporting those reserves as raw material or selling as titanium dioxide, an initiative was put in place to begin processing and producing with it in large quantities. “Rather than sell the resource, build industry around [it],” Jeff Lang, Titomic CTO, summarised at Formnext.
The commercialisation of TKF is key to that ambition. It works by accelerating titanium or titanium alloy particles out of a nozzle onto a scaffold. When the particles collide, they fuse together. This process can be packaged into ‘solutions’ customised to the user’s demands, or sold as ‘off the shelf’ platforms with build envelopes up to 9 x 3 x 1.5 m, and typically comprises of a spray head attached to a Kuka or ABB Robotic arm. A larger TKF set-up can consistently build at 30kg of material an hour, and up to 500kg a day.
It can make use of Australia’s titanium abundance, then, but what does it mean in practice? Lang offered the marine industry as a target market: one where titanium is used plenty, but where the processing of such quantities of material may be cost prohibitive. Fine titanium powders can be priced around 250 USD per kilo, meaning on a particularly productive day using TKF, that’d cost a company 125,000 USD in materials alone.
One of TKF’s advantages, though, is its ability to deal with irregular morphology powders, ones that don’t boast perfectly spherical particles, and cost closer to 50 USD per kilo. That particularly productive day using TKF now costs 25,000 USD in material usage.
Titomic
Titomic Oil & Gas valve
Oil valve section sample component on display at Formnext.
Earlier this year, Titomic signed a Memorandum of Understanding with shipbuilding firm, Fincantieri, with a view to using TKF for the manufacture of large mechanical ship components. The vendor has been testing sample applications, and through other relationships in the marine sector, is looking at how to redesign ships and how to better preserve them too.
“We’re working initially on areas around coatings and hulls,” Lang said. “Currently, a normal ship has to be dry docked every two years to do a new anti-fouling coating. We’re working with our anti-fouling coatings that blends the metals, like copper and titanium, that will give a ship up to a 20-year life before it has to get dry docked. With copper, it doesn’t allow any marine growth onto it. Producing hulls is long-term, but we work with a lot of other areas [like] finding improvements in the propulsion systems, the large propellers and drive systems, and even on the turbine blades.”
The marine industry is simply the tip of the iceberg, the scratching of the surface, for Titomic’s presence in industry and Australia’s new-found use of its titanium resource. In addition to its naval partners, Titomic is working with some of the largest players in aerospace, defence, and even the consumer goods market. Some want ballistic coatings, some want engine components, and some want luxury suitcases.
All of them want strong, resistant, lightweight products, and Australia wants a bigger slice of the titanium pie. It’s why Titomic exists.
“The metals industry hasn’t changed in 5,000 years,” Lang offered. “Additive manufacturing is just a digital version of that same process. We dig a resource out of the ground, we melt it, and then use fabrication techniques to get it into shape, and at the end of the day additive manufacturing is still doing the same process that’s been there. The advantage we have with the Kinetic Fusion process [is] we can do things that no one else can do. We can fuse dissimilar metals, we can use any two metals that have a wide range of melt difference, and we can fuse them together.
“I think we’re really opening the door to commercial viability with AM.”
