Additive manufacturing (AM), also known as 3D printing, has created new possibilities for designing and producing innovative NiTi medical implants. This technology offers significant advantages over traditional manufacturing methods, including the ability to produce complex geometries tailored to individual patient anatomy, potentially leading to better surgical outcomes and faster recovery times. These capabilities facilitate the creation of implants that are not only more biocompatible but also capable of promoting better osseointegration and reducing the risk of implant rejection.

There is a growing need to design tailored alloys for Additive Manufacturing (AM) in order to achieve the desired properties and quality in the resulting parts. The need is even stronger for functional materials such as Nickel- Titanium (NiTi) shape memory alloys (SMAs) with microstructure-driven properties such as superelasticity and the shape memory effect. These alloys have been used in innovative applications in aerospace, biomedical, and robotics. Despite their potential, the realization of NiTi SMAs through AM faces significant challenges, including phase stability, compositional heterogeneity, and solidification defects, which impede the achievement of desired microstructural and mechanical characteristics.

In this work, the authors introduce an approach in additive manufacturing that enables control of the crystallographic texture through controlling the build orientation in the laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) method. The LPBF parameters play a key role in tailoring the microstructure of the as-fabricated parts. The proposed approach provides the capability of altering/enhancing the properties of the as-printed NiTi shape memory alloys by controlling the texture. The anisotropy may not be preferred for applications with complex and multi-axial loading regimes; however, the approach can be suitable for application with the main loading direction such as torque tube actuators.