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 3D printer for printing, that is, prepare tantalum or niobium or its alloy metal products. The manufacturing method of the invention has low raw material cost and simple technological process, and the powder with good fluidity can be directly printed out metal products and artificial material implants according to the design drawing or the converted graph of bone scanning intercepted by the doctor. The production process is fast and the post-processing work is small.
Niobium and tantalum are rare metals with high melting points, whose melting points are 2468°C and 2970°C respectively. Niobium and tantalum are very ductile metals and cannot be made into powder by mechanical crushing directly. Tantalum powder can be prepared by compound reduction method, but its oxygen content is high. Both niobium and tantalum have good corrosion resistance, high temperature resistance and good electrical properties, which are widely used in aerospace, electronic semiconductor, nuclear power, medical human body implantation and other high-end technology fields. However, their metal and alloy products production process is complex, long flow, difficult, low material yield. Therefore, it is important to find a large-scale, low-cost, simple process production method of niobium, tantalum and their alloys.
The density of the product prepared by the manufacturing method of the invention is close to or even higher than that of the product obtained by the usual POWDER metallurgy method, which can reach more than 95% of the theoretical density, and the microstructure has no fine cavity. This manufacturing method can not only be used in the manufacture of metal medical implants, but also can be widely used in applications requiring dense structure, such as aerospace, nuclear power, automotive, instrument and other fields, due to the high density of metal products made by this manufacturing method.
The technical personnel in the industry should understand that the invention is not restricted by the above embodiments, the above embodiments and the specification only describe the principle of the invention, and the invention will have various changes and improvements on the premise of not deviating from the spirit and scope of the invention. These changes and improvements fall within the scope of the invention requiring protection, which is defined by the attached claims and their equivalents.
