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If you've ever held a metal 3D-printed part and wondered why it looks nothing like cast or forged metal — dense, isotropic, almost wrought-like — the answer starts with the powder. And not just any powder: spherical powder, ideally between 15 and 53 microns, with flowability measured in seconds per 50 grams and oxygen content measured in parts per million.
How do you make metal that spherical, that clean, at scale? The workhorse technology behind most aerospace-grade titanium and nickel alloy powders today is EIGA — Electrode Induction-melting Gas Atomization.
What is EIGA?
EIGA is a crucible-free gas atomization process. Unlike VIGA (Vacuum Induction-melting Gas Atomization), which melts metal inside a ceramic crucible, EIGA feeds a slowly rotating metal bar — the electrode — directly into an induction coil. The tip of the bar melts without ever touching a crucible wall. A high-pressure stream of argon or nitrogen then blasts the falling melt into thousands of tiny droplets, which solidify into powder particles before they hit the chamber floor.
The absence of a crucible is the defining advantage: no ceramic contact means no ceramic contamination. For reactive metals like titanium, which will dissolve oxygen from any oxide it touches, this matters enormously.
The Physics of a Spherical Droplet
Why do the particles come out spherical? Surface tension.
A droplet of molten metal in free fall, surrounded by inert gas, has exactly one job: minimize its surface area. And the shape that minimizes surface area for a given volume is a sphere. The cooling rate — typically 10³ to 10⁵ K/s — is fast enough to freeze the droplet before it has time to deform or collide.
The result: powder particles that are >95% spherical by image analysis, with satellite particles (small droplets welding onto larger ones mid-flight) kept to a minimum by careful gas flow design.
The Parameters That Control Quality
EIGA isn't a black box — it's a system with a surprisingly small number of control levers:
The most underappreciated variable is the gas-to-metal mass ratio (GMR). Run it too low and you get large, irregular particles with poor yield in the 15–53 μm AM cut. Run it too high and you waste gas, overshoot on fines below 15 μm, and drive up cost. The sweet spot is alloy-specific and hard-won through trial.
EIGA vs. Other Atomization Methods
EIGA sits in a sweet spot: contamination-free like PREP and plasma, but with higher throughput and lower cost per kilogram. For alloys like Ti-6Al-4V (TC4) and Inconel 718, where a few hundred ppm of oxygen separates an acceptable part from a brittle one, EIGA's crucible-free design isn't a luxury — it's a requirement.
What Makes a 'Good' AM Powder
Sphericity gets you in the door. What keeps you there:
Particle size distribution (PSD) — D10/D50/D90 must stay within specification batch to batch. A shift of 5 μm in D50 can send recoater spreadability off a cliff.
Oxygen content — For Ti-6Al-4V powder, Grade 5 spec allows up to 0.20% O, but aerospace buyers increasingly demand ≤0.13%. Every 0.01% of oxygen pickup costs you roughly 12–15 MPa in yield strength — and moves you closer to the brittle side of the ductility curve.
Flowability— Measured by Hall flowmeter. <30 s/50g is typical for quality EIGA powder; <25 s/50g is excellent.
Apparent density — A proxy for packing efficiency. 60–65% of wrought density is standard for spherical powders.
Why This Matters Right Now
Metal additive manufacturing is crossing the chasm from prototyping to production. GE's LEAP engine fuel nozzle, Stryker's spinal implants, SpaceX's SuperDraco chambers — all production parts, all running on spherical gas-atomized powder.
The bottleneck isn't the printers. It's the powder. And EIGA, for all its maturity, still has room to improve: tighter PSD control, lower oxygen floors, higher throughput without sacrificing quality.
At VMP Advanced Materials, our EIGA lines produce spherical powders across the full range of AM alloys — from standard grades like TC4 and IN718 to specialty compositions including T70X high-temperature titanium and Corrax maraging steel. Every batch is measured against the same metrics we've discussed here, because powder quality isn't a specification to negotiate — it's the foundation the entire print is built on.
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