EOS Joins MAT-H2 Consortium to Advance Hydrogen-Ready Metal AM

EOS has officially joined MAT-H2, a ten-member consortium focused on making metal materials and manufacturing processes safe for hydrogen environments. The group brings together industrial giants like SSAB, Wartsila, and Neste alongside research institutions including VTT and the University of Oulu. Their shared goal is straightforward: figure out which metals, coatings, and additive manufacturing methods can survive long-term exposure to hydrogen without losing strength or reliability.

Hydrogen is getting serious attention as a clean energy carrier, but it creates problems for metals. Hydrogen embrittlement is real. It penetrates metal lattices and makes parts brittle over time. That is a non-starter for pressure vessels, storage tanks, and energy system components. Additive manufacturing makes this harder because each build has its own microstructure, thermal history, and post-processing path. There is no universal qualification standard yet.

EOS brings decades of metal powder bed fusion experience to the consortium. The company already helped invent the process through Finnish research in the 1980s, and its NXG XII 600 system is one of the fastest industrial metal printers available. What MAT-H2 needs most is materials data, and EOS is positioned to generate it across a range of alloys and build parameters.

The consortium is not starting from zero. Siemens Energy has been running AM hydrogen burners in customer power plants since 2012, and its SGT 600 turbine has hit 100 percent hydrogen in workshop tests. Fronius, Linde, and TUV Sud recently qualified a 3D-printed pressure vessel component under a new draft European standard, prEN 13445-14. That effort required a multi-party working group and a binding AM procedure specification. MAT-H2 is attempting something broader: qualifying entire material families and manufacturing methods across multiple hydrogen exposure conditions.

This matters for the additive manufacturing industry because hydrogen qualification is becoming a gateway requirement for energy and transportation contracts. If EOS and its partners can produce validated datasets for AM materials, they remove a major barrier to adoption. If they fail, the industry stays stuck with conservative, slow-moving qualification cycles. The work is unglamorous standards development, but it is what separates a laboratory curiosity from an industrial supply chain.