| dc.description.abstract | Biofouling is the settlement and accumulation of microorganisms on the surface of a material submerged in sea water, and most of the time is an unwanted phenomenon and constitutes a financial burden. Titanium is a lightweight high strength metal characterised by good corrosion resistance, better than stainless steel, and would be the ideal material to be used in marine applications. However, biofouling would still happen in structures made out of titanium.
The aim of this study is to gain understanding of the biofouling process to be able to design Ti-based materials with the potential to prevent, or conversely enhance, biofouling, as both scenarios could have relevant industrial applications. In particular, it was planned to manufacture the Ti-based materials via powder metallurgy to take advantage of the intrinsic benefits of these techniques which include the freedom of designing new alloys, without the limits imposed by binary phase diagrams.
From literature, it was found that Cu and Mn could have respectively, the ability to reduce or promote biofouling. Therefore, various binary Ti-xCu and Ti-yMn compositions, where x = 0.5%, 2.5%, 5%, and y = 1%, 5%, 10%, were targeted and successfully manufactured via the conventional powder metallurgy route of cold uniaxial pressing plus vacuum sintering, obtaining fully homogeneous materials.
It is well known that residual porosity is still present in sintered Ti-based materials, and for that the binary Ti-xCu and Ti-yMn alloys were also a thermomechanical process via forging. This hot deformation process should reduce the amount of residual porosity, but it can also be used to tailor the microstructure, and thus the mechanical behaviour, which is paramount for many industrial applications. Along this line, it was decided to investigate the effect of the forging temperature (i.e. of the starting microfeatures) and thus forging from the β and within the α+β region was considered.
From the characterisation performed, the Ti-5Cu and Ti-5Mn alloys were chosen as the most promising alloys for the investigation of the antifouling and biofouling capability of the binary Ti-xCu and Ti-yMn alloys developed | |
