Abstract
Within the general context of solid-state sintering process, this work presents a numericalmodelling approach, at the grain scale, of ceramic grain packing consolidation. Typically, the sinteringprocess triggers several matter diffusion routes that are thermally activated: surface, grain boundaryand volume diffusions. Including this physics into a high-performance computing framework wouldpermit to investigate and to track the changes occurring into a granular packing during sintering. Inperforming this kind of simulations, one will face several challenges: the strong topological changesappear during sintering simulation at the grains scale, the evolution of the structure is mainly drivenby the surface tension phenomena through the Laplace's law, and the mechanical properties of thegrains could, possibly, be different. The proposed numerical simulations are carried out within anEulerian Finite Element framework and the Level-Set method is used to cope with changes in themicrostructure. The results obtained with this numerical strategy are compared with success to theusual geometrical models.
Highlights
Sintering has became one of the most important manufacturing processes
Even if the validity of those models is restricted to neck radius smaller that 30% of the radius of the particles, they represent a very useful tool concerning the validation of the kinetic obtained from more elaborated numerical approaches
The level-set Eulerian framework adopted allows to take into account all the topological changes that can appear during the sintering
Summary
Sintering has became one of the most important manufacturing processes. Sintering is used for the fabrications of high performances materials and parts in a wide -and still growing- range of domains. Even if it is possible to distinguish at least six different diffusion mechanisms, this work is mainly concerned by the surface, volume and grain boundary diffusions, which are considered to be the most important diffusion routes. Those diffusion mechanisms can be model by using the first Fickss law. The chemical potential characterize the energy carried by diffusion of a chemical species (here, atoms or vacancies), and its expression depends on region of the particles that is being considered, e.g. surface, volume, grain-boundary, etc. The matter flux associated with the surface diffusion is expressed by js. Numerical results are shown for two grains and for a granular packing
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