Exploring co-processing strategies for multi-material spark plasma sintering of pure Cu with AlSi10Mg by master sintering curves

Abstract

Manufacturing complex multi-material metallic components without assembly operations is currently being explored using novel additive manufacturing techniques. For materials combinations that are difficult to process via melting-based processes, multi-material spark plasma sintering (SPS) appears as a promising alternative. However, due to different sintering kinetics, materials with very different melting points might have to be co-sintered at non-optimal conditions. In this work, the potential to improve the co-sinterability of dissimilar materials, namely pure copper and AlSi10Mg, is evaluated by altering the sintering kinetics of copper using different particle size distributions (PSD). Using the master sintering curve (MSC) approach, the densification behaviour of spherical pure copper powder during SPS is evaluated systematically to study the influence of PSD, uniaxial applied pressure, and isothermal holding temperature. An intermediate-sized monomodal and close-to-optimal bimodal PSD are compared for processing at lower sintering temperatures. It was observed that, compared to an intermediate monomodal PSD, a near-optimal bimodal powder mixture yields fully dense Cu–AlSi10Mg components at lower temperature and shorter process times. Therefore, the use of a bimodal mixture enables multi-material sintering, offers energy and cost savings to produce multi-material components, and improves compatibility between materials with very different melting points.