Powder production for metal additive manufacturing
Metal powders are used as feedstock material for metal additive manufacturing process such as the laser powder bed fusion and powder directed energy deposition. There are several methods to produce powders, and the widely used technique is by atomisation process. In atomisation process, several meth...
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| Format: | Final Year Project |
| Language: | English |
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Nanyang Technological University
2023
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| Online Access: | https://hdl.handle.net/10356/167267 |
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| Institution: | Nanyang Technological University |
| Language: | English |
| Summary: | Metal powders are used as feedstock material for metal additive manufacturing process such as the laser powder bed fusion and powder directed energy deposition. There are several methods to produce powders, and the widely used technique is by atomisation process. In atomisation process, several methods can be used to shear the molten metal into powder. The method used to shear the molten metal are water, gas, plasma, and centrifugal mechanism. Recently, a new technique based on ultrasonic vibration was developed to produce metal powder, it has gained interest in the metal powder production industry. The objective of this project is to understand the production yield of ultrasonic atomisation (UA) and the physical properties of the powder produced by the novel method. The powder was then compared to powder produced by gas atomisation (GA). GA is the most common method to produce commercial metal powders in atomisation process.
In this study, two different metal materials powder were produced by UA method, in addition a high melting temperature refractory metal powder that was produced by the same method, prior to the start of this project will be investigated. It was found that UA method produces highly spherical shaped form, specifically for finer sized powders and metals that exhibit high melting temperature. Powder used in this project was analysed based on methods such as flowability, scanning electron microscopy, powder true density, particle size distribution and energy dispersive spectroscopy analyser. UA produced powder was observed to have a superior physical property as compared to GA method. Furthermore, UA method has a smaller footprint and ease of operation compared to other atomisation methods. UA appears to be a promising metal powder production technique for commercial use in the future. |
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