What Products is Tantalum Powder Used in?

Properties of Tantalum Powder

Tantalum powder is the powder state of tantalum metal. The chemical symbol Ta, a steel gray metal, belongs to the VB group in the periodic table, atomic number 73, atomic weight 180.9479, body-centered cubic crystal, common valence +5.

ta powder

Tantalum’s hardness is low and related to the amount of oxygen, ordinary pure tantalum, the annealed state of Vickers hardness is only 140HV .

It has a melting point of 2995°C and ranks fifth among the monomers, after carbon, tungsten, rhenium, and osmium. Tantalum is ductile and can be drawn into thin foils of the filament type. Its coefficient of thermal expansion is very small. It expands by only 6.6 parts per million per degree Celsius. In addition, it is very ductile, even more so than copper.

What are the types of Tantalum metal powder?

Tantalum metal powder is generally divided into nano tantalum powder, micron tantalum powder, high purity tantalum powder, spherical tantalum powder, etc.”

How to Manufacture Tantalum Powder?

“To make materials, the key is to rely on technical precipitation and accumulation.” Talking about the development process of spherical tantalum powder, Stanford Advanced Materials has been developing the technology for nearly 10 years since 2009.”

What Products is Tantalum Powder Used in?

The manager took the staff on a tour of the generation to three generations of powder-making equipment, as well as the latest dedicated powder-making machine for refractory metals, “We completed a breakthrough in the core technology of aerosolization of filamentous materials in 2015 and have been iteratively developing according to changes in the market for cutting-edge applications, from nano-powders, conventional 3D printing micron powders to the current refractory metal powders. ”

“The biggest challenge in R&D is to match with market demand, SAM focuses on high-end fields and finds cutting-edge application scenarios. We successfully docked with a U.S. military-civilian integration institute to fit their needs and customize the product.” The manager came to the product center, and we finally saw the real face of this cutting-edge material.

When we first picked up the bottle of metal powder in our hands, we immediately felt that the powder was very heavy, and when we gently shook it, we felt the powder undulate and flow with it like water – this is the special tantalum powder for 3D printing made by Stanford Advanced Materials. “Our loose packing density is very high, reaching 9.84g/cm3, which is close to 60% of the density of tantalum metal block, so although the bottle is small, it still feels very heavy in the hand. At the same time, this powder flows very well, so you will feel like water, and flows very smoothly. On the other hand, the physical property of high sphericity in the particle size range of ultra-fine powder makes the powder have better dispersion and larger specific surface area, which makes the powder more stable and excellent to use.”

“During the R&D process, we overcame two major challenges: first, to ensure high sphericity with effective particle size control; second, to solidify the process to achieve stable and efficient industrial mass production.” The manager of Stanford Advanced Materials said, “We have explored and improved our own powder-making process and developed a new generation of special models; we have verified and standardized many aspects such as raw materials, process parameters, and operating procedures.”

Porous Tantalum in Orthopedics

The preparation of biocompatible bony scaffolds has been one of the hot topics of research in the medical field. According to EvaluateMedTech, orthopedic-related medical devices had global sales of $36.5 billion in 2017 and will reach $47.1 billion in 2024, representing a compound annual growth rate of 3.7%.

porous tantalum

Current orthopedic metal implant materials

The choice of medical human bone implant materials, the earlier application of materials are stainless steel, nickel-chromium alloy, nickel-titanium alloy, the last 2 or 3 years the trend is TC4 titanium alloy, these materials contain nickel, chromium, or aluminum, vanadium and other harmful elements, and due to its elastic modulus exceeds the human bone too much, the material and the human body affinity is low, prone to “bone non-stick “phenomenon. Medical experts and the market are in urgent need of new non-toxic and non-hazardous new materials with good affinity to the human body to improve the current situation.

Multiple implant sizes, different clinical application scenarios

Porous tantalum has many advantages such as:

(1) Perfect integration with the host bone interface: compared to the most commonly used titanium, tantalum metal is more biocompatible and has a better osseointegration capability.

(2) Unique bionic trabecular structure: Tantalum’s elastic modulus is closer to that of bone tissue, which makes it more suitable for bionic trabecular structure in the human body than other metals.

(3) Inducing rapid bone and vascular growth into it can promote rapid growth of bone tissue and vascular tissue into the pores of porous tantalum, and its highly porous and supportive structure provides extensive space for bone growth, forming a good biological fixation, which can effectively solve the exothermic effect of bone cement and its effect on surrounding tissues, which is great clinical progress.

The above advantages make it show great clinical application value and applicability in different sizes of orthopedic implants, and different parts of bone defects.

porous tantalum application

1) Application of porous tantalum in orthopedics

In clinical applications, porous tantalum printing can be applied to all small and medium-sized restorative products. For large-sized repair products, considering the high density of pure tantalum and the excessive weight of the printed implant prosthesis, multi-component gradient printing can be adopted, with porous tantalum used in the bone growing-in area and other metals such as titanium alloy, which is cheaper and lighter in quality, being used in other areas.

With the continuous research on tantalum materials in recent years, several clinical trials have proven that new implants made of medical tantalum in combination with titanium and other metals can compensate for the shortcomings of other metal materials in terms of biocompatibility, bioactivity, and implant-bone bonding.

2) Tantalum coating – a new direction for orthopaedic applications

Tantalum metal has excellent corrosion resistance, and its coating on the surface of certain medical metal materials can effectively prevent the release of toxic elements and improve the biocompatibility of metal materials. Tantalum coatings can meet the three elements of the ideal bone graft material, namely osteoconduction, and osteogenesis, resulting in wider clinical applications and more flexible patient choices.

In addition, tantalum has also been used as an implant material in the restorative treatment of patients with missing teeth. Experiments have shown that conventional implants can absorb up to 30% of the loading energy during the loading process, while tantalum trabecular implants can absorb 50%-75%, which allows the implant to disperse the loading force to the surrounding bone during the long-term intraoral functional loading, avoiding stress concentration, while the higher friction coefficient provides good initial stability during implant placement, thus improving the dental implant bonding rate, especially in implant patients with poor bone quality.

Conclusion

Although porous tantalum is an ideal material for orthopaedic implants. However, due to the variability of the human body and the random morphology of bone defect sites, such as patients with bone tumors and patients with bone deformities, standardized porous tantalum can no longer meet the requirements of individual patient treatment. From the perspective of the development trend of clinical medicine, the best treatment method should be personalized treatment and the best implant should be a personalized implant.