Redefining Titanium Alloy Productivity With the EOS M4 ONYX
Ready to Transform Your Titanium Applications?
03 SEPTEMBER, 2026 | Reading time: 5 min
In metal additive manufacturing (AM), the traditional rules for 3D-printing titanium (Ti64) often force undesirable compromises. These include high surface roughness, the tedious manual removal of mandatory support structures for low angles, and a productivity gap between theoretical and real-world results.
The EOS M4 ONYX and our new Ti64 60µm parameter set change this narrative. This development follows our philosophy of adapting the process to the application and not the other way around. More than a hardware update, the EOS M4 ONYX is a powerful synergy of six-laser power and intelligent software designed to shatter legacy laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) constraints. It enables faster builds and exceptional part properties without time-consuming design or process iterations.
Better Buildability, Better Surfaces: A New Ti64 Process
Low-angle printing (the downskin surface) has traditionally been a major obstacle in titanium AM. Because powder has much lower heat conductivity than solid metal, printing an overhang over a powder bed can cause localized overheating. In legacy processes, this creates an unstable melt pool, leading to overheating and curling edges that risk recoater contact, as well as surface roughness and a reliance on support structures to pull heat away.
The EOS M4 ONYX solves this by enabling reliable low-angle titanium printing down to 25°–30°, completely support-free. By eliminating support structures within defined application boundaries, the benefits impact your entire workflow. They include:
- Reduced post-processing: You can eliminate the hours of manual labor traditionally required to cut away stubborn titanium supports.
- Lower cost per part: Unlock further manual labor reductions and faster post-processing turnaround times, lowering total production costs.
- Expanded design freedom: Engineers can design complex internal channels and lightweight geometries without worrying about post-build accessibility.
Surface Quality: Beyond the Vertical Wall
While vertical walls are straightforward, maintaining consistent titanium surface quality on complex, curved geometries are notoriously difficult. The solution is automatic contour parametrization. Instead of static parameters, the system dynamically scales laser settings based on the local overhang angle of the component.
This makes it possible to adjust the contour parameters according to the overhang angle to maintain stable melt pools and reduce overheating, resulting in improved surface quality. Furthermore, this advanced parameterization targets down-facing surfaces where heat typically builds up. Because up-facing surfaces are already stable and less sensitive to overhang variations in legacy processes, this targeted adjustment delivers a remarkably homogeneous surface finish. Parts come out closer to net-shape, drastically reducing the need for aggressive surface-smoothing operations.
Real-World Productivity
A common industry myth is that a system's productivity is fully defined by its theoretical build rate: layer thickness × hatch distance × scan speed. But in reality, this math completely ignores "jumps" - the non-productive periods when the laser is off and scanner mirrors move between vectors. These micro-seconds accumulate, leaving a significant gap between the spreadsheet and the actual build clock. The EOS M4 ONYX drives metal AM productivity from a real-world perspective through hardware and software synergy. It’s equipped with:
- Six highly dynamic lasers: Stepping up from four lasers to six increases raw coverage and melting power.
- Next-gen scanners: Advanced dynamic scanners minimize time lost during short jumps when changing direction.
- Smart exposure ordering: Intelligent software algorithms eliminate skywriting and short jumps, while minimizing long jumps (over 1 mm), maximizing laser "on" time.
- 60µm layer sweet spot: This thickness perfectly balances fast material deposition with fine feature resolution.
Ultimately, true productivity is measured by the clock on the wall, not a theoretical formula. The graphic below illustrates build time simulations of jobs with different parts.
Comparing Productivity on Real Applications
Porosity and Material Integrity
For high-performance sectors like aerospace and medical manufacturing, productivity is meaningless if not accompanied by flawless material integrity. Titanium components often face cyclic fatigue loading, where subsurface defects act as dominant crack initiation sites.
The new titanium process parameters on the EOS M4 ONYX deliver exceptional density across the entire build plate, dropping porosity levels below 0.005%. This is critical because, until now, the values reported in the literature have tended to be theoretical ones achieved in the lab using density cubes. Here, we’re achieving this with actual components, even in cantilevered configurations.
Our team identified that legacy titanium porosity typically originated at vector endpoints. The EOS M4 ONYX introduces new, specialized exposure features that actively mitigate pore formation in these critical near-surface zones. By eliminating these potential failure points, the process achieves excellent mechanical properties and the high levels of reliability that mission-critical applications demand.
Sustainability and Cost
Economic efficiency and sustainability often go hand in hand. A major hidden cost in titanium printing is “spatter,” the molten droplets ejected from the melt pool. These oversized particles experience oxygen pickup while airborne, altering their chemistry. It’s necessary to sieve spatter out and discard it. If droplets land back on the powder bed during a print, they can introduce defects.
The EOS M4 ONYX uses smarter scanning strategies to reduce spatter at the source, offering a clear double win:
- Sustainability: Less powder loss means better material efficiency and a lower ecological footprint for an energy-intensive material like titanium.
- Process stability: Minimizing spatter keeps the powder bed pristine, ensuring highly reproducible, defect-free parts. Ultimately, reducing powder loss positively impacts the cost per part and helps move towards more sustainable production.
Integration and the Path Forward
While the EOS M4 ONYX is the flagship platform for this innovation, EOS is actively transferring these parameter benefits to existing systems, including the EOS M 290 and EOS M 400-4. Due to hardware differences, legacy machines won’t match the raw speed of the EOS M4 ONYX, but users will still achieve measurable upgrades in surface quality, density, and spatter reduction.
The EOS M4 ONYX leads the field because its next-generation scanner technology provides the dynamic performance needed for advanced, feature-specific parameterization. This solution is fully proven and ready to serve as a reliable foundation for automated workflows and full-scale serial production. The EOS M4 ONYX doesn’t just print faster - it prints smarter. By throwing out the old playbook on overhang constraints, heat dissipation, and theoretical speeds, it removes the shackles of traditional design rules.
Ready to see how the EOS M4 ONYX can transform your titanium applications? Download the Ti64 parameter specifications.
