Production and Anodic Colouring of Newly-Designed Titanium Jewels

Abstract

Jewels production traditionally implies the use of precious metals; yet in the last decade, non-precious or semi-precious metals have gained much attention. The processing methods applied to these materials often diverge from traditional techniques in order to adjust to the logics of series production: the most applied technologies involve a first forming step by plastic deformation, followed by either mechanical or galvanic surface finishing (in most cases, anodic oxidation). At the same time, laser melting processes have been developed in the last few years in application areas such as mechanics and biomedicine. The use of such technologies has not concerned the typical contexts as yet, such as design products and jeweller’s art, though particularly complex shapes can be achieved with extremely high precision. Hence, in this research work, the selective laser melting technology was applied to create titanium jewels prototypes with original design, obtained by computer-aided design modelling; the surface finishing was achieved through anodising processes, which had the aim of generating different colour hues on jewel surfaces through the achievement of interference conditions between light and the so-formed anodic oxide layer.