Characterisation plays a huge part in our ability to understand what's happening in any of our powder-based systems, and this is as true for powdered-polymer Additive Manufacturing (AM) as for anything else! 

Our Advanced Polymer Sintering team in Sheffield has been working with the team at Malvern Panalytical, to help understand more about how the size and shape of our powder particles influences their behaviour in the AM processes themselves.


We started by taking simple measurements of powder flow relevant to different stages of our AM processes, in particular to the initial powder deposition and the packing of powder within the build area. 

The team at Malvern were then able to use their Morphologi 4 automated imaging system to show us all kinds of information about the size and shape of the powders, which can then be used to explain some of the behaviour we see them exhibit. 

By understanding this, we can learn more about how to optimise powders for these processes.

You can read an application note about this work by clicking here.

And a short accompanying blog post by clicking here.

Watch this space for the outcomes of other ongoing collaborations with the Malvern Panalytical team!'