Metal Additive Manufacturing Conference 2019

Nowadays rheology is quite commonly known and established in industries such as food and beverages, body care, or petroleum; rheology for metal melts is still at the beginning but gets more and more established in both, research and industry. Rheology helps to determine the viscosity of a certain material at different conditions like temperatures or shear rates. Viscosity is one of the most important material characteristics, besides surface tension, in the gas atomization process during production of metal powder. Only if viscosity of the metal melt lies within certain boundaries a good quality metal powder can be produced. This contribution aims at introducing rheology in general and the advantages for metal powder production in specific. On the basis of several measurements on typical metal alloys for additive manufacturing the results of such measurements are shown and their impact for gas atomization processes is discussed.