Advances in metal powder production and characterisation

Sweden has been a major supplier of metal powders for many decades and has a well-established powder industry. Current powder production techniques have evolved around the world over these decades to the state-of-the-art that exists today. However, the use of metal powders is undergoing a significant change with the development of metal additive manufacturing techniques and other high-tech applications that are placing new demands on powders.

At KTH, we are working to optimize and control the process of gas atomization, which is the most common technique to make powders for use in metal additive manufacturing. The aim is to increase the fraction of metal powder that can be used for additive manufacturing and to reduce energy consumption and development time to make new powders. Techniques such as computational fluid dynamics and thermodynamic modelling are used, together with planned experimental trials. It is also not agreed what measurements techniques are most useful to ensure powder are appropriate for intended applications and a systematic study of this is underway at KTH, which shall also be discussed.

These are some of the topics that will be raised during this docent lecture.