From Certificates to Cycles: Building a Digital Powder History for Reliable AM Production

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In powder-bed AM, powder is more than just feedstock. It is a dynamic process variable that evolves with every reuse, blending step, and handling event. Yet in many organisations, powder management is still treated as a box-ticking exercise. Incoming certificate of analysis filed away, a generic reuse rule applied, and everything else tracked in sprawling Excel sheets.

On paper, this looks manageable. In reality, it leaves quality, traceability and scrap largely at the mercy of incomplete data.

When powder history lives in spreadsheets

Ask an AM team a simple question: “What exactly is the powder history behind this build?”. The honest answer often involves several files and a lot of detective work.

Batch numbers might sit in one spreadsheet, mixing ratios in another, and reuse cycles in a third. Ageing information is patchy at best. When a deviation appears in CT or mechanical testing, tracing it back to powder is slow and uncertain. For audits, somebody spends hours reconstructing a genealogy story that should have been available at the click of a button.

This is especially risky for the kinds of manufacturers amsight focuses on: powder-bed AM users in regulated industries such as space, defence, medical and semiconductor, typically running fleets of five or more machines and already drowning in documentation effort.

Regulators are moving in the same direction. In safety-critical applications, bodies like the FDA increasingly expect clear evidence that powder reuse strategies are understood, controlled and monitored over time, not just at the point of purchase.

From certificates to cycles: Powder as a digital history

The shift we advocate at amsight is simple to state and powerful in practice.

Stop treating powder as a static material with a certificate. Start treating it as a digital history of cycles, mixes, and properties.

In a digital powder history, every relevant event becomes data:

• Receipt of virgin powder with its certificate
• Each mixing event, including participating batches and ratios
• Every reuse cycle, sieving and the associated build jobs
• Measured property changes over time such as particle size, flow, chemistry

Instead of isolated snapshots, you get a continuous storyline that can be queried, visualised, and related directly to part quality.

How amsight implements digital powder history

With amsight, powder is tracked via QR codes: scan on receipt, scan when mixing, scan when filling a machine, scan when returning unused material. Every scan updates the central genealogy automatically, no manual logging required.

• You can see, at a glance, which powder batches and blends were used for a given build.
• Degradation is tracked with data rather than memory; trends in properties over cycles can be analysed.
• When a deviation occurs, root-cause analysis can follow the digital trail from failed part back to specific powder conditions.

For customers such as MMB Volum-e, Melotte and other regulated-industry users, this approach underpins end-to-end traceability, structured SPC, and a significant reduction in scrap and qualification effort.

Why powder is the missing link in many AM quality strategies

Many organisations have invested heavily in in-situ monitoring, CT scanning, and process parameter control. All of these matter. But without a robust grasp of what is happening to the powder itself, quality strategies remain incomplete.

A digital powder history closes that gap. It provides:

• Stability, by revealing how powder strategies affect process capability across machines and time
• Traceability, by making powder genealogy instantly available for audits and customer reviews
• Scrap reduction, by linking defects to specific powder states and enabling smarter reuse limits

At amsight, we see powder management not as an isolated module, but as part of a digital quality backbone that connects powder, process, and inspection data in one place.

For AM manufacturers serious about scaling production, moving from certificates to cycles (from static documents to a living digital history of powder) is no longer a nice-to-have. It is the missing link that turns powder from a blind spot into a lever for reliability, compliance, and competitive advantage.

If you’re ready to put powder at the centre of your AM quality strategy, talk to us today, and ensure you register for our upcoming webinar.