Interview with Jordi Pijoan, FAMPAI project coordinator
What is the FAMPAI project all about?
The project FAMPAI involves developing and manufacturing powdered materials, both metallic and ceramic, for application in manufacturing parts for powder metallurgy or for coating using spray technologies.
What has your company brought to the project?
As a technology centre, Eurecat seeks to support research in businesses. Our input to the project has been to manufacture these materials in powder form so that companies can use them in their production processes. The powdered materials developed in this project are bespoke and in the right quantities for the needs of the businesses in the consortium, meeting specifications that are otherwise not available on the market.
What do you think is the main breakthrough in the project?
From Eurecat’s point of view, this project has enabled us to move forward in developing powder manufacturing technologies, specifically the development of centrifugal atomisation technology for producing metal powder and microwave plasma spheroidisation technology. As part of this project, we have worked with new materials and gained the knowhow needed to manufacture them.
And what was the main challenge?
The technologies we are developing at Eurecat have not yet been validated on an industrial scale and so there are technical and production constraints we need to address. This project has enabled us to step up the development of these technologies by exploring new materials and learning about the processes
The project has targeted shaping parts using powder metallurgy and treating and functionalising surfaces by means of sprayed-on coatings. What are the uses of this advanced process? In which sectors and sub-sectors can it be applied?
There is a growing need for powdered materials featuring higher performance and quality so that the end product can meet increasingly demanding requirements. Eurecat is catering for this need by developing technologies which make it possible to manufacture powders with properties that differ from those currently available on the market.
