SamyPowder: what’s behind a tin of metal powder

SamyPowder is our catalog of metal powders for laser powder bed fusion: 316L, Fe2709, Ni718, Ti-6Al-4V, AlSi10Mg, CoCr, and, starting this year, GRCop-42. All produced by inert gas atomization. And a clarification before the catalog: our machines don't require you to buy our products. The parameters are open, and they work with any powder you choose.

That said, here's what's behind a can, because powder is the consumable that determines whether an installation is profitable, and almost no one explains what they're paying for.

The catalog

The last one is the most recent addition and the most difficult of the seven, for the reason we explained in how metal powder is manufactured: copper reflects infrared light and dissipates heat so quickly that it barely melts. Cu-Cr-Nb alloys overcome this challenge while retaining most of their conductivity.

Why atomization with inert gas

Because it's the only affordable method that produces spherical particles. And sphericity isn't a matter of choice: it's what determines whether the coating spreads a dense, uniform layer in less than a second, thousands of times in a row.

spherical powder rolls and settles on its own. An angular one—the kind produced by atomizing with water, which is much cheaper—clumps together, forms bridges, and leaves gaps. Each gap in the layer is a pore in the part. The shape of the particle literally determines the final density.

The inert gas also performs a second function: it prevents the metal from oxidizing while it is liquid. In titanium, that is the difference between a usable powder and one that is not.

What is controlled, batch by batch

A powder is specified with more than one number, and whoever gives you only one is only telling you half the story:

• Chemistry, including the composition within the alloy's range.
• Particle Size, not just the nominal 15–45 µm but how it's distributed within that range.
• Sphericity and satellites, those small particles attached to larger ones.
• Apparent density and flowability, which is the practical test of whether the coating will be able to handle it.
• Residual oxygen, critical in titanium.
• Batch traceability, which is what your end customer will ultimately demand.

That control is a significant part of the price per kilo, along with the fact that only a fraction of each spray run falls within the useful range.

And why do we sell it without attaching it to the machine?

It's the question we get asked most often and it deserves a direct answer.

A machine that only works with its manufacturer's powder puts the customer at a mercy. The day a better material appears, or the same material at a lower price, or simply the day that supplier has a supply problem, the customer is trapped. We've seen what that does to a project.

Our approach is the opposite and comes at a commercial cost: ALBA's parameterization is open. You can adjust power, speed, frequency, energy density, filling strategy, and layer thickness, and save the result as your own parameter set. With that, you can qualify the powder for anyone you want.

We sell SamyPowder because it's good and because having a single point of contact simplifies life for most people. Not because there's no alternative.

Reuse the powder

In a build process, the part occupies a small part of the vat's volume. The rest is recovered: it is sieved to remove splashes and agglomerates, mixed with virgin material in a controlled proportion, and returned to the machine.

What needs to be monitored is drift. Each step exposes the powder to heat and traces of oxygen, and with each cycle, the chemical composition changes. In sensitive alloys, oxygen is systematically monitored, and the number of acceptable cycles is defined.

With titanium and aluminium, this operation also has a serious safety component, because in fine powder form they are reactive. That's why we made the GARBI sieve: vibration and ultrasound to avoid having to hit the sieve, and an inertable interior, designed from the ground up for ATEX environments.

What's coming

Within the CDTI's MISSIONS program, we are working on obtaining powder suitable for additive manufacturing from ceramic and metal waste. If the starting material is waste with management costs instead of virgin raw material, both the price of the consumable and the environmental footprint decrease.

It's not simple. A waste product starts without sphericity, without controlled particle size, and without stable chemistry, which are precisely the three things the process requires. That's where the work lies, and that's why it's a research project and not a finished product.

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The complete catalog with the application of each alloy is on the materials page. If you want to try a new material without committing an entire batch, that's what SamyFlex(/samyflex-volume-modulo-volumen-reducido/] is for.