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 (AM). AM creates objects layer upon layer from different metal powders or metal alloy powders. Non-metallic elements like carbon, sulfur, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen influence the physical properties of metallic materials. These elements may be found in the powdered raw materials used for additive manufacturing, or may be introduced during the production process. Therefore, thorough quality control should always comprise analysis of the raw material and the final product. In this application note, Verder Scientific shows that combustion analysis offers convenient and reliable solutions to reproducibly measure element concentrations in a range from a few ppm to percentages.