Prealloyed powders usually melt over a range of temperatures. This feature is useful in performing supersolidus liquid phase sintering, where liquid forms inside the particles when heated just over the solidus temperature. Densification by supersolidus liquid phase sintering is sensitive to time-temperatures. A major difficulty arises when a narrow temperature range exists between densification...

We wrote two computer programs, 3D and BUMP, to interpret transmission electron microscope (TEM) micrographs made during a study of the initial stage sintering of ultrafine alumina particles (UFP’s, 20–50 nm in diameter). The first simulated the 3D geometric relationships of particles, from which we concluded that surface diffusion was the predominant sintering mechanism because no shrinkage oc...

Spark plasma sintering (SPS) is currently widely applied to existing alloys as a means of further enhancing the alloys' figure of merit. However, the determination of the optimal sintering condition is challenging in the SPS process. This report demonstrates a systematic way to independently optimize the Seebeck coefficient S and the ratio of electrical to thermal conductivity (σ/κ) and thus ac...

(Ti,Zr)C powder was sintered with WC-Co following an industrial process, including an isotherm at 1410 °C. A series of interrupted sintering trials was performed with the aim of studying the sintering behavior and the microstructural evolution during both solid-state and liquid-state sintering. Reference samples, using the same elemental compositions but with the starting components TiC and ZrC...

II-VI semiconductors form an important class of opto-electronic materials. CdSe is a promising material for the fabrication of photovoltaic devices. Polycrystalline CdSe films have been deposited onto ultra clean glass substrates by sintering process. The optical band gap of these films was determined by reflectance measurements in wavelength range 400-850 nm. The band gap of these films was ob...

The residual porosity is an unavoidable phenomenon of the components produced by powder metallurgy process which in turn largely affects the strength property of the same. Now a day it is possible to control porosity of powder metallurgy components and retain them to desired amount when required. The porosity of a powder metallurgy component is greatly depends on the sintering temperature. In t...

The current research compares the processing influence of Spark plasma sintering (SPS) over conventional sintering on aluminium alloy AA2219 MWCNT composites. Also investigations on the effect of MWCNT content on the properties of composite are presented and discussed. Though unreinforced matrix processed under SPS showed 24.68% improvement in hardness over conventional, the same could not be r...

Physical, electrical, and morphological properties of thermally annealed silver nanoparticle thin films are described. These solutiondeposited nanoparticle thin films form highly conducting films at low curing temperatures via sintering due to the high surface area to volume ratio. Measured resistivity correlates with thickness decrease and densification, and can be explained by a simple geomet...

Metallic nanoparticle inks are used for printed electronics, but to reach acceptable conductivity the structures need to be sintered, usually using a furnace. Recently, sintering by direct resistive heating has been demonstrated. For a microscopic understanding of this Joule heating sintering method, we studied the entire process in real time inside a transmission electron microscope equipped w...