The Next Phase of EB-PBF Will Be Defined by Beam Control

• The bar for metal additive manufacturing has moved. Early on, the question was often simple: Can the machine print the material and produce a dense part? That still matters, but...

The bar for metal additive manufacturing has moved. Early on, the question was often simple: Can the machine print the material and produce a dense part? That still matters, but it is no longer enough. You can see this across metal AM. Laser powder bed fusion continues to advance quickly. More lasers, higher power, beam shaping, larger machines, better monitoring, and increased automation are pushing L-PBF further into production. Recent major events like Formnext, TCT Asia, AMUG, and RAPID + TCT have shown how quickly the laser side is scaling. The most visible example is China. Eplus3D announced the EP-M3050 metal AM system with a build volume over three meters in X and Y and up to 256 lasers. This is an extreme example, but it shows where L-PBF is heading: scale, parallelization, auto