Metal Additive Manufacturing Conference - MAMC 2020

The increasing demands on metal powders for additive manufacturing applications go hand in hand with an increasing energy consumption for producing these powders. For example, finer powders can be produced by increasing atomization gas pressure and temperature, or also by increasing melt superheat. More spherical particles (or particles with a lower oxygen content) can be produced by using Nitrogen, Argon or even Helium as atomization gas instead of compressed air. This study is a contribution to understand the impact of these parameters on the carbon footprint of the powder. The energy efficiency of a metal powder production process can be defined by relating the theoretical energy to overcome surface tension forces of the melt material to the actual energy consumption to produce this material. Furthermore, a theoretical melt breakup model is used to estimate the impact of the most important production parameters (gas and melt temperature, gas pressure, necessary product yield) on the energy consumption of the process. These theoretical results will be compared to actual powder production data, and methods to improve the carbon footprint of the atomization process are suggested.