3DPrint.com interviewed Markus Garscha, Director of the Additive Manufacturing Business Unit at Ossberger, to discuss the economics of powder management in LPBF metal printing. This 150-year-old German engineering firm, originally rooted in fluid mechanics, now provides additive manufacturing powder management equipment covering the entire workflow—from depowdering and conveying to sieving, feeding, and transport—with the goal of delivering "powder ready to go back into the machine" or "separated parts ready for the next process step." Garscha points out that automated depowdering not only saves labor but also brings repeatability: the quality of recovered powder and depowdered parts is determined by machine parameters, not by individual operators. Combining labor savings, higher throughput, and process reliability, customer payback periods typically range from 6 to 18 months. Sieving is often underestimated—for high-value powders, the ability to reliably recover, condition, and return powder directly determines the economics of LPBF. As additive manufacturing scales up, powder post-processing automation is becoming a bottleneck in production lines. Ossberger's differentiation comes from its fluid mechanics perspective: rather than focusing on individual machines, it optimizes powder state, flow, and utilization as a single system across the entire process, achieving a closed, repeatable, and highly efficient powder cycle.