In times of fluctuating supply security and climate protection, materials are increasingly gaining a second life. This requires energy and wear-intensive recycling processes. Resource-efficient and high-quality processing of waste demands materials that are durable despite extreme conditions. In most cases, this is accompanied by more challenging machinability, hence the more wear-intensive variant is commonly chosen. In addition to the high material waste, this also leads to increased labor costs for the replacement of wear parts and thus to system downtimes.

Additive manufacturing makes it possible to design such components close to their final contour and adapted to their function. Powder Bed Fusion by Electron Beam (PBF-EB) also allows materials to be used that were previously difficult to process. These include steels containing hard particles. As such powders can only be atomized to a limited or even no extent, this makes it difficult to establish a suitable process window.

The study was conducted to produce powder mixtures of the material FeCr10V and the hard material TiC and to investigate the effects on processability in the PBF-EB process in more detail. For this purpose, parameters such as the power, the beam speed, the line spacing or the scanning strategy were varied and evaluated on metallographic sections. In addition to the investigation of porosity, microstructure and composition using light and scanning electron microscopy, final measurements of hardness and wear resistance were carried out.