Titomic Limited

In 2007, Titomic Founder Jeff Lang was invited by the CSIRO to participate in an initiative named ‘Ore for More’ – a project which sought to utilise and add value to Australia’s abundant titanium mineral sands, from which ilmenite and rutile are extracted. With over 300,000,000 tonnes of titanium mineral sands within its crust, Australia is home to the world’s largest deposits of mineral sands.

Initially, it was noted that these minerals could be transformed into metal powders for use in the emerging market of additive manufacturing, however the volume consumed by many 3D printers and the industry overall is small, resulting in a relatively small market. Re-examining the problem, this led the team to explore how a larger volume of titanium could be used in manufacturing at scale and speed through new or existing technologies.

Throughout the process, the research team looked toward Cold Spray for a solution – a technique of supersonically depositing metal particles onto a scaffold to create metal coatings. Drawing upon Professor Fox’s medical research surrounding scaffold-based tissue engineering, the team explored the use of this process to create metal parts by building particles layer upon layer. It was found that not only was the process well-suited for additive manufacturing, it also provided a range of unique advantages.

Building on this success, the founders went on to patent and licence the technology via the CSIRO. After extensive research and development, a company named Titomic was established in 2014 to commercialise this technology, trademarking this novel manufacturing method as Titomic Kinetic Fusion^®. With this technology, Titomic now offers industrial-scale additive manufacturing utilising titanium and other high-performance metals.