Experimental Study of Performance of Ti-6Al-4V Femoral Implants Using Selective Laser Melting (SLM) Methodology

Abstract

Selective laser melting (SLM) technology used for the design and production of porous implants can successfully address the issues of stress shielding and aseptic loosening associated with the use of solid implants in the human body. In this paper, orthogonal experiments were used to optimize the process parameters for SLM molding of Ti-6Al-4V (TC4) material to investigate the effects of the process parameters on the densities, microscopic morphology, and roughness, and to determine the optimal process parameters using the roughness as a judging criterion. Based on the optimized process parameters, the mechanical properties of SLM-formed TC4 alloy specimens are investigated experimentally in this paper. The main conclusions are as follows: the optimal combination of roughness is obtained by polar analysis, the microhardness of SLM-molded TC4 alloy molded specimens is more uniform, the microhardness of specimens on the side and the front as well as the abrasion resistance is higher than that of casting specimens, the yield strength and tensile strength of specimens is higher than that of ASTM F136 standard and casting standard but the elongation is not as good as that of the standard, and the elasticity and compressive strength of porous specimens are higher than that of casting specimens at different volume fractions. The modulus of elasticity and compressive strength are within the range of human skeletal requirements. This work makes it possible to fabricate high-performance porous femoral joint implants from TC4 alloy SLM-molded materials.