Introduction
An integral part of industrial product development is the manufacture of prototypes and initial samples, regardless whether the product is a simple screw or the complex part of an airplane. To fabricate single pieces, which are often rather small, in a production environment is usually a costly procedure. Based on this cost-benefit calculation a special application field of powder metallurgy has developed in the past few years: additive manufacturing. Additive manufacturing (AM) is the “process of joining materials to make objects from 3D model data.”1 AM creates objects layer upon layer from different metal powders or metal alloy powders. The specifications of the manufacturing process depend on the requirements and possibilities of the user, and on the type and size of the object to be produced.
