“This accreditation for our internal lab allows us to have more control over testing costs and lead times and overall quality controls over our products,” said Frédéric Marion, product manager – metal powders at AP&C. “It will also help customers to use our powder testing service to analyze used powder and perform investigations or R&D work.”
According to quality leader Rachel Riendeau, the company focused on the accreditation of its chemical analysis of titanium alloys, as well as particle size distribution testing by sieving and light scattering.
“For reactive materials, like titanium, and in an industry like additive manufacturing – which has stringent requirements – we need precise control of the material properties and often need to push the understanding of the method to another level to obtain accurate results with little deviation,” added Marion. “As an example, sometimes the availability of the proper certified reference material (CRM) can be a challenge for certain narrow chemical compositions requirements.
“AP&C’s team strives to better understand and control products, and this is pushing us to improve our analysis tools […] Next in line will be the other powder physical properties (flow rate, apparent density, tap density, humidity, etc).”
