Over the past decades Additive Manufacturing (AM) has often been praised as the future of manufacturing technology. In some aspects AM has indeed democratized manufacturing capabilities, providing even consumers with equipment to produce items in the conform of their own home. However the expected big breakthrough never completely materialized except for in some niche markets, where the benefits in term of design freedom, weight saving and/or added functionality markedly outweigh the disadvantages of using a more complex and less proven technology or materials.

The latter aspect of a limited range of compatible materials plays a significant role in all AM technology. For each newly developed AM technology we see a trend that materials for use in the process are selected based on processability first rather than material properties. Once the process is more developed new materials are added to the range. More recently there has been a shift towards the development of AM specific materials, but the compromise between process and material properties never completely disappears.

In Laser Powder Bed Fusion (L-PBF), one of the most industrially significant AM technologies, this compromise was well understood from the very onset as the process involves a rapid transition from molten metal to solidified material. It is in part because of this the first work on multi-material AM using L-PBF appeared already in 2009 [1], just moments after the first commercial machines were launched as a way to circumvent the material property compromise. While great strides have been made in multi-material AM since these first efforts [2], it is clear that the intensity of the Laser melting process poses a challenge for combining multiple materials in a single part, especially at the interface where materials inevitably mix.

It is with this in mind we have been looking back at traditional Powder Metallurgy and Ceramics processing technology, and looking for ways to use the large available knowledge base in AM. In this presentation we present such an approach with the unique capability of joining materials with widely different characteristics.