This work deals with sintering additives for the low temperature pressureless sintering of Si3N4, via a transient liquid technique. Much attention has been given to the development of a sintering process using low-cost Si3N4 powder (Silzot HQ, Germany) as the starting material and employing sintering additives which are also both economically attractive and enable sintering at low temperatures....

Clathrate hydrates have recently received attention as novel storage and transportation materials for natural gases or hydrogen. These hydrates are treated as powders or particles, and moderate storage temperatures (around 253 K) are set for economic reasons. Thus, it is necessary to consider the sintering of hydrate particles for their easy handling because the hydrates have a framework simila...

Selective Separation Sintering (SSS) is a powder layer based Additive Manufacturing approach. SSS can fabricate high temperature ceramic and metallic parts at comparatively lower cost with high quality. In the printing process a dry powder of higher sintering temperature is deposited into the base material which makes up the part. The inserted powder defines the boundary of the part and separat...

A method for sintering nanoparticles by applying voltage is presented. This electrical sintering method is demonstrated using silver nanoparticle structures ink-jet-printed onto temperature-sensitive photopaper. The conductivity of the printed nanoparticle layer increases by more than five orders of magnitude during the sintering process, with the final conductivity reaching 3.7 × 10(7) S m(-1)...

Layer-wise slurry deposition (LSD) is an approach in solid freeform fabrication (SFF), that can be used for fabrication of hydroxyapatite (HA) bone implants. In view of biocompatibility, HA is a suitable ceramic material for hard tissue replacement implants. SFF technique is the prototyping of objects directly from computer models without part-specific tooling or human intervention. A slurry is...

Spark plasma sintering (SPS) is a sintering process that is capable of sintering hard worked powders in short times. This technique was used to fabricate bulk Cu and Cu-SiC nanocomposites. Pure Cu and mixed powders of Cu including 4 vol% of SiC nanoparticles were mechanically alloyed for 25 h and sintered at 750˚C under vacuum condition by SPS method. Microstructures of the materials were chara...