From 13 to 16/10/2019, in Maastricht, was held the 30th annual congress on powder metallurgy. It was an opportunity to do technology watch and review or discover suppliers of raw materials or equipments. There were about 1100 participants over the 3 days with 60 posters and 250 oral presentations on 50 sessions with a hall of 150 exhibitors.
The topics that have been discussed are hard materials, sintering-pressing with fatigue resistance, SPS sintering technologies, HIP treatments for making pieces or for post-treatments, powders (characterizations and processes), the PIM and many sessions around additive manufacturing. In the context of the PEPS project, many presentations have addressed alternative additive manufacturing, particularly with binders. In particular, we were able to see a presentation on the FDM printing of tungsten carbide threads by the University of Coimbra in Portugal. The Fraunhofer in Dresden presented interesting metal results and parts with a 3D screen printing additive technology that allows to “extrude” a composite (binder + metal powder) through a grid by obtaining scaffold pieces oriented according to the extrusion direction. The company AMES in Spain has also presented developments with extruded resins to create titanium scaffolds. The Austrian company, Lithoz, works on identical subjects with resins loaded with ceramic and now with metal powders. We were able to discuss with AIM3D, which has developed an extrusion type printing machine with catamold granules.