EnerAM: IETF Funding to Cut the Energy and Carbon Cost of Metal 3D Printing
How we helped a five-partner UK consortium win Industrial Energy Transformation Fund support for a feasibility study on energy reduction in metal powders for additive manufacturing.
At a glance
The challenge
UK manufacturing accounts for around 12% of national greenhouse gas emissions, and additive manufacturing (AM), for all its promise, is one of the more resource-hungry corners of it: the carbon footprint per kilogram of material in AM can be around ten times higher than conventional manufacturing, because the process demands highly specific powder feedstocks.
Atomising Systems Ltd, a Sheffield powder producer founded in 1992 with more than 140 atomising plants delivered across 35 countries, produces around 600 tonnes of gas-atomised and up to 2,000 tonnes of water-atomised powder per year. Cutting the energy, waste and carbon embedded in that production, and in the downstream laser metal deposition process, needed a rigorous, funded feasibility study.
The solution
EnerAM set out a process-optimisation approach for the whole AM value chain: data analytics and AI to optimise powder production parameters, design of experiments combining primary and recycled secondary materials, and integration of a material recycling and capture system already proven by Laser Additive Solutions at up to 95% efficiency with blue-chip customers such as Sulzer Pumps, Siemens Energy and Rolls-Royce.
Optimising the additive manufacturing value chain end to end
What we did
1. Framing the study around IETF's goals
The IETF funds energy efficiency and decarbonisation in industry, so the bid was built around quantified energy and carbon numbers at every step: sector emissions, site-level production volumes, yield losses and the specific saving potential of each proposed measure.
2. Assembling complementary evidence
We structured the consortium's strengths into one coherent story: ASL's four decades of atomising expertise, LAS's TRL8-9 recycling system already validated in industrial service, and the modelling, AI and image-processing depth of the University of Sheffield and Brunel University London, with HyBird's digital tools completing the chain.
3. Writing a deliverable-led plan
The proposal set out work packages from site process-flow analysis through experiments to a commercial viability assessment, with a PERT network, Gantt chart, decision gates, risk register and quarterly review cadence, giving assessors a study they could see being delivered.
The result
The study assessed the technical and commercial viability of cutting cost, energy and carbon simultaneously across powder production and laser metal deposition, building the evidence base for deployment-scale investment in sustainable additive manufacturing.
Why this matters for your organisation
Government decarbonisation funds like the IETF reward one thing above all: credible, quantified energy and carbon numbers tied to a deliverable plan. EnerAM shows how we translate deep engineering expertise into exactly that.
If you are preparing an IETF, Innovate UK or Horizon Europe application, we can support concept development, consortium structuring, proposal writing, evaluator-style review and full submission. And if a project is not competitive, we will tell you before you spend money on it.