Meet our material characterization solutions for Additive Manufacturing
You can’t improve what you can’t measure, as the saying goes – and at Malvern Panalytical, we know how true this is! Especially when it comes to additive manufacturing, insight into your material’s chemical, structural, and morphological properties are key to a high-performance final product. But often, how you measure is just as important…
How our techniques go hand-in-hand with AM
Luckily, at Malvern Panalytical, we offer a range of different techniques for multiple AM applications! We explored them all together with Netzsch at our joint online seminar, ‘Hand in hand with additive manufacturing’ last year on September 13.
The event covered the requirements and techniques needed to characterize and qualify materials and parts – including polymers, composites, and metals – for additive manufacturing. We explained how each characterization technique can support different goals: marine and offshore certification, re-use of metal AM powders, fatigue performance predictions…. and even more besides! To bring these explanations to life, we also shared some tours of our analytical instruments that are most relevant for AM – read on for a handy overview:
Empyrean and Aeris: XRD solutions for material research, development and quality assurance
First, our colleague Zhaohui Bao, Product Manager XRD, talks us through our multipurpose Empyrean X-ray diffractometer, and how it supports a wide range of AM applications. XRD allows you to investigate a material’s crystalline structure – and in turn, properties such as residual stress, texture, and crystallite size.
As Zhaohui explains, the Empyrean diffractometer is our flagship XRD system. It supports a variety of measurement types on a range of materials, including nanoparticles, powders, solids, and even thin-film materials. This means it can support every part of your AM workflow – from your metal powders to the printed parts themselves. All with the highest data quality, productivity, and ease of use! Watch Zhaohui’s Empyrean tour!
Next up, Zhaohui continued with a tour of our more compact Aeris XRD instrument. A versatile and easy to use system that employs the same high-performance technology as the Empyrean. Aeris supports analysis on powders, thin films, and solids – and you can choose from manual or fully automated sample loading. Watch the Aeris tour!
Zetium and Epsilon: XRF solutions to meet your measurement needs and application requirements
Moving onto X-ray fluorescence (XRF), our Product Marketing Manager Lieven Kempenaers gave us a tour of the Zetium. With its high power – and therefore high sensitivity – this floor-standing spectrometer is one of the best instruments for accuracy, speed, sample throughput, and resolution in elemental analysis. This makes it ideal for process-critical AM applications – such as aviation or turbine metal. Watch Lieven’s tour below:
Lieven then demonstrated all the benefits of our Epsilon benchtop XRF systems. These energy-dispersive systems have smaller, lower-power components, and are therefore more compact. This makes them ideal for applications like checking certificates or controlling contamination in incoming powders or metal parts.
The Epsilon 4 has a sample changer for up to ten samples, which can also be easily removed to analyze a bigger sample. Its ‘little brother’, the Epsilon 1, has a roomier sample chamber to allow for larger samples. This chamber contains a camera for small-spot analysis, enabling you to analyze a section of your sample compared with other points on the sample. Both benchtop instruments only need electricity and are easy to operate. Watch the Epsilon demo.
Mastersizer 3000: World’s most popular laser diffraction system for trusted particle size analysis
Of course, one of the most important parameters for AM powders is particle size, which affects powder flow, particle packing, layer thickness, and reactivity. That’s where our Mastersizer 3000 comes in! In her demo, Anne Virden, Product Manager Micro-Materials, gave us a tour of how the world’s most popular laser diffraction instrument works.
The Mastersizer 3000 can measure metal, polymer, and ceramic powders, and you can disperse the powder samples in air or liquid – whatever fits your application. Watch the Mastersizer tour and demo.
Morphologi 4: Static image analysis for high-quality particle images and shape distributions
The Mastersizer is very sensitive to oversize particles – but it can’t tell you whether these particles are agglomerates, elongated, or oversize. That’s where automated image analysis comes in. In her final session, Anne explained how our Morphologi 4 allows you to measure particle size and shape in much higher volumes for more reproducible data. The Morphologi can measure particles in suspension in wet cells, captured on a filter, or on standard microscope slides – and its classifications help you to make sense of the results. Watch the tour below:
Within this diverse family of versatile instruments, we hope that there’s something for you, whatever your AM goals are! We hope you enjoy the tours – and that you’ll get in touch with us if you’d like to learn more…
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