Titanium alloys used in additive manufacturing often cool and bond together in column-shaped crystals during the 3D printing process, making them prone to cracking or distortion. And unlike aluminum or other commonly used metals, there is no commercial grain refiner for titanium that manufacturers can use to effectively refine the microstructure to avoid these issues.

Titanium is neither a precious metal nor rare, yet among industrial metals it has the reputation for being very expensive. It's the fourth most abundant metallic element and the ninth most abundant of all the elements in the earth's crust. Its commercially useful oxide ore occurs in the minerals rutile and ilmenite and numerous iron ores, and exploitable ore deposits are liberally scattered around the world in Australia, Canada, India, Malaysia, Norway, Russia, South Africa and the U.S. But due to its properties and high cost it has often been referred to as unobtanium.

Innovators at NASA's Glenn Research Center have developed a new Nickel Titanium (NiTi) shape memory alloy (SMA) with additions of Hafnium (Hf) and Zirconium (Zr) that offers a broader transformation temperature range and greater dimensional stability than any other SMA on the market. In spite of their many unique properties, broad commercial success of SMAs has remained elusive due to limited phase transformation temperatures and dimensional instability in high cycle applications.