IIT Hyderabad develops India's largest metal powder plant for 3D printing

A bigger metal powder plant does not instantly change what sits on a hobbyist’s bench, but it can change the raw material behind the print. IIT Hyderabad has joined DMRL and Innomet Advanced Materials Ltd. on a 100 kg inert gas atomiser meant to produce high-purity spherical metal powders, the kind metal AM shops need when they want repeatable parts instead of flaky feedstock and clogged runs.

The project was publicly announced on May 14-16, 2026, after IIT Hyderabad had already floated an Expression of Interest on May 22, 2025, looking for an industry partner to host and co-develop the machine. That notice was unusually specific: IIT Hyderabad would serve as Principal Investigator, the selected company would be Co-PI, and the funding to establish and maintain the atomiser would go to that partner. The target was not generic metal powder, but Ni-based superalloys, cobalt-based alloys, special steels and high-entropy alloys with oxygen content below 150 ppm.

That detail matters because oxygen is where a lot of powder quality lives or dies. For additive manufacturing, hot isostatic pressing and thermal coatings, low-oxygen spherical powder is what keeps a build from turning into a cleanup job. The new unit is being described as India’s largest indigenous clean metal and alloy powder facility, and it is expected to support additive manufacturing, gas turbine engine components, aerospace, defence, energy and advanced manufacturing work.

The proposed unit will be set up at Innomet’s Hyderabad premises and made available for DRDO and IIT Hyderabad research for five years. It is funded by the DRDO-Industry-Academia Centre of Excellence at IIT BHU, Varanasi, under DRDO’s Directorate of Futuristic Technology Management, with the Defence Metallurgical Research Laboratory also in the mix. That makes this less a consumer-facing powder aisle and more a serious industrial pipeline for aerospace and strategic materials.

For the 3D printing crowd, the payoff is indirect but real. If the plant can consistently turn out nickel-based superalloys, ferritic and austenitic steels, cobalt-based alloys and high-entropy alloys at scale, then service bureaus and advanced manufacturers in India may have a better shot at steady supply, tighter specs and fewer import bottlenecks. That is a long way from lowering the price of metal powder for a desktop machine, but it is exactly the kind of infrastructure that can make the next round of metal AM parts easier to source and cheaper to run.

Prof. B.S. Murty, director of IIT Hyderabad, called the collaboration a major milestone toward self-reliance in advanced materials and future manufacturing technologies. For metal printing, the real milestone is simpler: better powder, made closer to home, is often the first step to better parts.