The manufacturing method of tantalum, niobium or its alloy additive includes the following steps: first prepare tantalum powder, niobium powder or its alloy powder for 3D printing: then load the prepared tantalum powder or niobium powder or its alloy powder into a 3D printer for printing, that is, prepare tantalum or niobium or its alloy metal products. The manufacturing method of the invention has the advantages of low raw material cost, simple technological process, good fluidity of the prepared powder and direct printing of metal products and artificial material implants according to the design drawing or according to the bone scan conversion pattern intercepted by the doctor, fast production process and small post-processing workload.
Niobium and tantalum are rare and high melting point metals, their melting points are 2468℃ and 2970℃ respectively, and can not be prepared by spray method. Niobium and tantalum are also very ductile metals, which can not be directly made into powder by mechanical crushing. Tantalum powder can be prepared by compound reduction, but its oxygen content is high. Niobium and tantalum have good corrosion resistance, high temperature resistance, good electrical properties, widely used in aerospace, electronic semiconductor, nuclear power, medical body implant and other high-end technology fields. However, the production process of their metal and its alloy products is complex, long and difficult, and the material yield is low. Therefore, it is very important to find a large-scale, low-cost and simple process for the production of niobium, tantalum and their alloys.
Because the powder produced by the ball milling process is sharp and extremely irregular, the fine ball is used to shape the ball milling, and the sharp corner sharpening of the powder is ground, so that it becomes a polyhedron shape that is nearly spherical. At the same time in the ball milling and shaping process will inevitably produce a lot of debris and other ultrafine powder, due to its poor flow performance, even no fluidity, to meet the liquidity requirements of 3D printing, must remove this ultrafine powder, and the use of dry screening method is difficult to screen clean, so 325 or 400 mesh sieve process using wet screening method, First, the -200 tantalum powder is placed in a 325 or 400 mesh vibrating screen, and screened with water under continuous vibration mixing. During the screening process, with the participation of deionized water medium, it is vibrated and stirred, and the adsorption between the powders is greatly reduced. The ultrafine powder is carried away by water through the screen and filtered out through the sieve hole. The powder with particle size greater than 325 or 400 mesh but less than 200 mesh was obtained by drying the material on the screen. The applicant has shown through numerous studies and experiments that the powder above +200 mesh is too thick and not suitable for 3D printing requirements, while the powder with -325 or 400 purpose is too poor in fluidity and not suitable for 3D printing requirements. The selection of metal powder with a particle size greater than 325 or 400 mesh and less than 200 mesh is the most able to meet the requirements of 3D printing.
