**1. Introduction**

Additive manufacturing technologies are currently one of the fastest growing manufacturing processes. The technologies provide engineers an innovative approach for design and manu‐ facture of parts. They substantially reduce the amount of post‐processing and improve product

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quality by producing parts with form the closest to computer model data. All the variety of additive technologies are available in the annual report [1].

An important part of additive manufacturing of metal parts is the initial material. There are different approaches of additive manufacturing, which use different types of initial materials, and the most popular technologies, such as selective laser or electron beam melting, laser cladding, and binder jetting, use initial material in the powdered form [2–4], but there are also technologies which use initial material in sheet or wire form [5, 6].

In the chapter, the state of art of metal powder based on additive manufacturing will be presented. The chapter considers three main themes—metal powders, properties of metal powders, additive technologies, and properties of metal parts. It will be shown the methods for mass production of metal powders for additive manufacturing technologies, descriptions on characterization of powder properties and microstructure and mechanical properties of metal samples.
