Additive Manufacturing (AM) and especially Laser-based Powder Bed Fusion (LPBF) is a potential key factor in the development of new products in tool making. For this reason, research is increasingly being carried out on LPBF of tungsten carbide and especially WC-Co, mainly with a focus on the manufacturing process itself. Furthermore, investigations have shown that powder properties are important influencing factors for the LPBF process and manufactured parts. In this paper, four commercially available WC-Co powders with varying properties and produced by different processes are compared with regard to their processability in the initial LPBF processing stages. Therefore, these powders are described and tested regarding morphology, powder layer quality, bulk density, flow properties and laser reflection. The evaluation shows that powders have strongly varying bulk densities, sufficient flow properties, can be used for coating of continuous powder layers and thus provide basic suitability for the processing in initial processing stages.
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