An antibacterial effect is essential for medical applications, but around 40,000 endoprostheses are replaced in Germany every year, with bacterial infection being the cause in around 20 % of cases [1,2]. Titanium alloys, for example Ti-6Al-4V, are used to manufacture artificial joints and surgical devices [3-6] but has poor antibacterial properties [7]. This can be achieved by adding copper (Cu), which has an antibacterial effect [8-11] and is also a trace element that is well tolerated by human cells and contributes to the formation of new bone [12,13]. Ti6Al4V-xCu powder is not commercially available, so its clinical suitability is unknown. The literature describes that processability problems arise with Ti-Cu alloys with > 6 wt.% Cu [14-16], but that an antibacterial effect only occurs with at least 5 wt.% Cu [8-10,17].

Alloy development and production for the laser powder bed fusion process (PBF-LB/M) is complex, costly, time-consuming and, above all, energy-intensive. In order to make the alloy development steps more sustainable, the approach of mixing pre-alloyed and/or pure elemental powders is used in presented work. This allows the exact amount required for this application or property-oriented alloy development to be mixed in order to perform first tests, initial characterizations and investigations of the mixed alloy. Due to the flexible variance of the mass % of Cu in the mixture, the Cu content can be increased step by step and the processability in the process can be ensured and the antibacterial effect in the sample can be investigated afterwards.

With this approach it can already be shown that a mixture of Ti6Al4V with 10 mass.% Cu can be processed in the PBF-LB/M process and dense samples (> 99.99 %) with fully melted Cu microstructures can be produced (Figure 1).