Powderful allies

Handling powders used to be the preserve of the process sectors, from pharmaceuticals to food. But new manufacturing techniques for handling metals and blending them with other materials are making powders increasingly important in other sectors.

It is becoming clear that powder processing might be the best way to make and work with high-strength alloys — and much of the research is attracting interest and support from the aerospace industry.

The subject is being addressed in the UK by Powdermatrix, one of the industry academia Faraday Partnerships that develops and transfers new technologies from the lab to the marketplace. Among the company’s projects is a method for adapting a continuous rotary extrusion technique that can extrude titanium powder.

Developed with Outokumpu Holton, a Finnish-owned, Bournemouth-based metal processing company, the system could allow the process to handle higher-value materials for more specialised applications.

Known as ConForm, the continuous rotary extrusion process was originally developed by the UK Atomic Energy Authority in the 1970s. Its advantage is that is transforms a traditional batch process of extrusion, where a great deal of pre-processing is needed to make a metal billet in the right form and temperature to be extruded, into a continuous process.