Iver Anderson and Emma White, metallurgists at Ames Laboratory, like to show off two samples of metal powders encapsulated in custom-made hourglasses to visitors. Dull gray, the powders are barely remarkable in and of themselves, let alone in comparison to each other—until the hourglasses are flipped.

When the hourglasses are flipped, observers can compare how the powders flow through the narrow necks of glass. Except one of the powders, created by traditional manufacturing methods, doesn’t exactly flow. It starts and trickles and stops, it needs shaking and manipulating to get through. The other powder, produced at the laboratory’s high-pressure gas atomization facility, pulses smoothly through the hourglass of its own accord.

It’s all because Ames Laboratory’s gas atomization method produces smooth spherical particles, rather than the irregular edges of traditionally manufactured powders.

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