Modelling the Sintering Neck Growth Process of Metal Fibers under the Surface Diffusion Mechanism Using the Lattice Boltzmann Method

Houping Dai,Dongdong Chen,Zhoushun Zheng

doi:10.3390/met9050614

Abstract

In this paper, the sintering neck growth process of metal fibers under the surface diffusion mechanism is simulated by using the Lattice Boltzmann method (LBM). The surface diffusion model is developed considering the geometrical characteristic of metal fibers. Then, the LBM scheme is constructed for solving the developed surface diffusion model. The sintering neck growth process of two metal fibers with different fiber angles is simulated by LBM. The simulated morphologies of sintering metal fibers well agree with ones obtained by experiments. Moreover, the numerical simulation results show that the sintering neck radius of two metal fibers is increased with the increase of fiber angle, which implies that the initial geometrical characteristic plays an important role in the sintering neck formation and growth of metal fibers.

Highlights

Porous metal fiber materials have many excellent functional characteristics, such as filtration separation, energy absorption, sound absorption, efficient combustion and enhanced heat and mass transfer, and have been widely used in chemicals, textiles, medicine and electronics [1,2,3]
The atoms located in the area near the sintering neck move to the contact contact zone along the surface of metal fiber and accumulate to form the sintering neck
From the perspective of curvature-driven driven diffusions, the curvature of the contact zone is gradually decreased with the increase of diffusions, the curvature of the contact zone is gradually decreased with the increase of sintering neck sintering neck growth to reduce surface energy and maintain stability

Summary

Introduction

Porous metal fiber materials have many excellent functional characteristics, such as filtration separation, energy absorption, sound absorption, efficient combustion and enhanced heat and mass transfer, and have been widely used in chemicals, textiles, medicine and electronics [1,2,3]. Porous metal fiber materials are manufactured by a sintering process. This is because metal fibers have a unique geometrical structure and contain a large amount of strain energy. The high-temperature sintered metal fibers are formed to the shape of the bamboo node. The sintering neck, which is used to describe the junction connected by two metal fibers, is irregular and complex. The morphology and size of the sintering neck seriously affects the properties of porous metal fiber materials. It is meaningful to study the formation and growth process of the sintering neck

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion