Honeywell Qualifies 6K Additive’s Nickel 718 for 3D Printed Aerospace & Defense Parts

6K Additive is renowned for manufacturing sustainable additive manufacturing (AM) powder, and offers a wide portfolio of premium metal and alloy powders that include titanium, copper, stainless steel, and nickel, and refractory metals like niobium, rhenium, and tungsten. With its signature UniMelt process, the company produces these powders from scrap material, which helps enable the circular economy. They recently shared some very exciting news—Honeywell has qualified its Nickel 718 for aerospace and defense parts. I spoke to 6K Additive’s Chief Marketing Officer Bruce Bradshaw and Brian Morrison, Vice President of Sales – Powder, to learn more.

“It’s taken a while to get qualification in a company like Honeywell, and it’s been quite a process,” Bradshaw told me.

This process actually began back in 2023. 6K Additive, well-known in the marketplace for its nickel-based alloy powders, already knew the Honeywell team pretty well. In addition to its site in Phoenix, Arizona, Honeywell also does some 3D printing work via contract manufacturers, which are approved to produce the company’s parts. One of these partners basically vouched for 6K Additive, and that’s when Honeywell reached out.

“We supplied some material, they printed it, and did a lot of thorough testing at their site in Phoenix,” Morrison explained. “Then after that, there were onsite audits at 6K, where they had some of their supply chain engineers come onsite and do a thorough walkthrough of our process.”

There was a lot of follow-up after the testing and audits, including manufacturing agreements, but even that wasn’t the end of it. After 6K received feedback from Honeywell that the material tested well, there was still further administrative work to complete, as the powder has potential for use in defense applications. Ni718 is a traditional nickel superalloy, offering high-temperature strength and corrosion properties, which makes it a great choice for a wide variety of different applications, including aerospace, oil and gas, energy, and defense.

Honeywell has plenty of experience with AM, having earned FAA certification for its first flight-critical 3D printed engine part back in 2020. But this news is still a big deal, because as Morrison explained, it would have been far easier for the company to stick with traditional gas-atomized powder materials for these kinds of applications.

“For them to go and actually qualify a new process, a fundamentally different way of making powder, says a lot. For an aerospace company to make that change and come do the audits and all the due diligence work they need to do, it’s not insignificant. I think that’s what’s most exciting to me, is that you have a company as significant as Honeywell that’s willing to branch out and do something differently.”

Another reason this is a smart decision by Honeywell is that 6K Additive is a U.S.-based company. As we take a closer look at the domestic supply chain, there aren’t too many powder manufacturers producing metal powder in North America. I brought up the global uncertainty surrounding tariffs these days, and Bradshaw said that this actually “goes two ways” for 6K Additive.

“One is that a lot of our competitors import their feed stock, either in a wire format or an ingot from overseas, either Russia or China or Ukraine, which are all places that have issues potentially,” he continued. “But for us, with scrap material, our source of feedstock is here. So we’re avoiding tariffs based on feedstock and lead times and supply chain.”

Morrison concurred, noting that 6K Additive has “taken a different approach to how we’re producing this versus the traditional supply chain.”

“So not only from a sustainability standpoint, but to be able to secure the raw materials that we’re using. The resulting powder is a very spherical powder and flows better in the system in a lot of cases. So I think all in all, it was a good solution for Honeywell in the end.”

Because of this qualification, any of Honeywell’s contract manufacturers around the world, including Europe and the U.S., are now able to purchase this Ni718 powder from 6K Additive as a qualified source.

“This is great, because if you think about it from an aerospace standpoint, supply chain risk is a huge thing,” Morrison explained. “So it’s usually very standard for aerospace OEMs to have redundancies, you know, dual sources. And I think this was another step in that direction to reduce their risk in the supply chain, which of course, in this day and age, throughout COVID, but now even more recently with a lot of the tariff situations, has become more important.”

Honeywell hasn’t publicly discussed any specific 3D printed aerospace and defense applications for which it will use 6K Additive’s Ni718 powder, but it has shared use cases like bearing housings and a brake component.

“They’ll utilize our powder for production parts, but also even more importantly, as they continue to grow this technology internally, those next generation engines and other applications that they’re working on at Honeywell will be able to utilize our material for the development of those additive parts,” Morrison said.

6K Additive is continually adding new customers and applications, and receiving inquiries about new materials like tungsten and C103, so stay tuned!