Elemental Analysis of Metal Powders and Metal Parts Produced by Additive Manufacturing

An integral part of industrial product development is the manufacture of prototypes and initial samples, regardless whether the product is a simple screw or the complex part of an airplane. To fabricate single pieces, which are often rather small, in a production environment is usually a costly procedure. Based on this cost-benefit calculation a special application field of powder metallurgy has developed in the past few years: additive manufacturing.

Most AM methods are based on the same procedure. A laser beam locally melts the upper powder layer which solidifies and forms a layer of solid material. This is repeated layer by layer until the final object is created. The quality of the unused powder is determined by particle size analysis (sieving), and in some cases also by elemental analysis, before it is returned to the manufacturing process

Additive manufacturing (AM) is the “process of joining materials to make objects from 3D model data.”1 AM creates objects layer upon layer from different metal powders or metal alloy powders. The specifications of the manufacturing process depend on the requirements and possibilities of the user, and on the type and size of the object to be produced.

Additive manufacturing is becoming an increasingly established production technology. However, as it is still new, the required process steps have not been uniformly defined yet. There are, for example, no industry-wide standards describing the quality control process. An established parameter is the particle size distribution of the powder used for AM. Particle size, however, should not be the only characteristic used for quality control. 2

To check the quality and purity of these raw materials, suitable processes need to be implemented. The content of various “foreign” elements, for example, should be closely monitored to ensure a high-quality end product.