2. Manufacture of metal powders

Metal powders are a raw material that can be used in many different ways to manufacture complex parts. There are a number of technologies for producing powders: gas atomization, plasma atomization, hydriding/dehydriding for titanium, rotating electrode, underwater atomization for steel .

Rotating-electrode technology is unusual in that it is not suitable for mass production, and is therefore rather costly: it uses bars of the metal to be melted as raw material, and...