Effect of pressure on the gas atomizer to fabricate stainless steel metal powder

Metal powder is used in the Powder Metallurgy (PM) application process. Most of the metals used in the PM are stainless steel made by the gas atomization process. This study uses the free fall gas atomizer. The material was used to produce the metal powder from various forms of stainless steel 304 raw material, which is melted in an electric induction furnace. This method is very practical to be applied in the large-scale metal processing industries. While the gas pressure variation results show that metal powder with a smaller size will be produced more using high gas pressure. The free fall gas atomizer has successfully produced stainless steel 304 metal powder with the size <40 µm and have a spherical shape. The well-rounded sphericity for 8 bar pressure, 10 bar pressure, and 12 bar pressure are 61.1%, 41.7%, and 37.5% respectively. It can be concluded that 12 bar pressure produces the smallest size range of powder about <40 µm with the most quantity about 1.11%wt, followed by 10 bar pressure about 0.41%wt and 8 bar pressure about 0.07%wt.