The Complete Characterisation of Additive Manufacturing Powders with AZtecAM

Additive manufacturing (AM) has a wide range of applications across many industries including aerospace, automotive, healthcare and construction. Metal powders used in AM are the building blocks on which the technique is based. In order to ensure that high quality, safe products that are resistant to failure are produced, it is essential that the individual grains within the powders have ideal morphology, the correct size distribution and are free of contaminants. Processes such as recycling powders can result in particles having non-ideal morphology and contamination is often a concern when powders are handled. As such, monitoring of the quality and cleanliness of metal powders throughout the production process is essential if contaminants are to be found and their sources controlled.

In this tutorial, we discuss how AZtecAM, an automated characterisation and cleanliness solution for the SEM based on the industry leading AZtecFeature particle analysis platform, can solve these problems and provide the necessary information to allow informed decisions to be made on powder contamination and reuse.

You will learn how AZtecAM:

• Characterises powder morphology rapidly for thousands of grains
• Automatically identifies and reports on the presence of contaminants in metal powders – to provide an assessment of contaminant sources and support in the process of contamination control
• Is easy to use and deploy for a consistent cleanliness monitoring program