Additive Manufacturing continues to make progress as a manufacturing technology, mostly with the help of more awareness and more productive machines. As Additive Manufacturing technologies race to become faster and more affordable while achieving high quality, it becomes easier to make a business case to convert parts away from legacy processes. Most of the focus is on the manufacturing step, because it can be the single largest cost in the processing of an AM part – but should that be the sole focus?

Metal Powders Works has announced it is the newest resident of Neighborhood 91, the additive manufacturing production campus located at Pittsburgh International Airport. The 10,000-square-foot space will function as MPW’s main production facility, improving production capacity by a factor of 8X. This move signals a significant shift to an operations focus for MPW as the company winds down fundamental development.

A comparative life cycle assessment (LCA) was conducted to evaluate the environmental impact of the Metal Powder Works (MPW) DirectPowder™ Process in comparison to traditional atomization techniques used to produce metal powders for additive manufacturing applications. Publicly available literature was used as data sources for benchmarking water and gas atomization processes as well as the impact of using renewable energy sources.