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The future is titanium: TriTech Titanium Parts targets the opportunities for MIM, Binder Jetting and Investment Casting Titanium has long been recognised as a material with huge potential. Lightweight with excellent mechanical properties, it is also corrosion resistant and biocompatible. However, the challenge has always been cost – in part because of difficulties in machining. The Metal Injection Moulding of titanium – and more recently Binder Jetting – now present major opportunities to expand the material’s use. TriTech Titanium Parts, LLC is seizing this opportunity – whilst simultaneously maximising the scope of what it can manufacture by offering Investment Casting. Bernard North visited the company for PIM International. Titanium and its alloys represent a small but growing proportion of the Powder Metallurgy industry, and it was with great interest that in July this author visited one of the few players in this emergent segment, TriTech Titanium Parts, LLC, at its facility in an industrial area of Detroit, Michigan, to learn about its story and progress. He met with the company’s owner and president, Robert ‘Bob’ Swenson (Fig. 1), and toured the plant with Scott Lashay, Production Manager. Some companies’ names give no idea of what the organisation actually does, but TriTech Titanium Parts is highly descriptive. The company uses three key technologies – Metal Injection Moulding, Binder Jetting (BJT) and Investment Casting – to make titanium alloy parts. Swenson studied Metallurgical Engineering at Purdue University, Indiana, and later complemented his technical education with an MBA at Harvard Business School in Boston. While TriTech Titanium Parts is a very young company, founded in April 2022, its roots can be traced back many decades to The Frankel Metal Company, a Midwest metals
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scrap collector and processor founded in the 1950s, which, in 1990, sold the titanium recycling portion of its business to Metallurg Inc. In 1996, Swenson purchased this entity and formed Global Titanium Inc., which he ran, growing its shipment volume by a factor of ten over the ensuing twenty-five years. Key milestones included the significant
expansion of the production of recycled aerospace grade turnings in the 2005-2007 timeframe, the installation and startup of the hydride/dehydride process for producing titanium powder, and, crucially, the titanium parts business around 2015-2017, initially by implementing MIM, closely followed by Investment Casting.
Fig. 1 Robert ‘Bob’ Swenson, owner and president of TriTech Titanium Parts, LLC (Courtesy TriTech Titanium Parts)
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