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Additive manufacturing (AM) represents a class of rapidly developing manufacturing technologies in which material is selectively added layer-by-layer as opposed to traditional, subtractive methods. The layered approach employed in AM decomposes complicated, three-dimensional manufacturing designs into simple, planar geometries, allowing for unprecedented design freedom unencumbered by constraints of traditional manufacturing. While topics such as design for additive manufacturing (DfAM), thermal distortion and residual stress, and process modelling efforts have received recent attention, studies related to powder feedstock requirements for powder bed fusion (PBF) and directed energy deposition (DED) systems remain scarce, and only recently have researchers begun to investigate the influence of powder characteristics on the AM process. Furthermore, standard characterization techniques used in industry, having originated in the powder metallurgy industry, fail to capture powder characteristics relevant to AM. Existing powder quality metrics are related to packing efficiency and flowability, but have found little merit when applied to the dynamics of spreading in PBF. While newer techniques such as powder rheometry and dynamic avalanche testing have shown promise, they are encumbered by an excess of output data, and both techniques fail to relate their results to the ability of a powder to spread in a PBF system. To date, no powder characterization technique is able to predict the spreadability of AM feedstock. In fact, no such spreadability metrics exist. This work endeavors to establish viable powder spreadability metrics …