Sintering stress and microstructure in ceramic powder compacts

Abstract

The behavior of the sintering stress and microstructure during sintering is studied under various thermal and physical conditions. Specifically, the study includes sintering under isothermal or constant heating rate conditions; and altering the starting compact structure by pre-coarsening to increase the particle size, or by compaction to increase the starting density. Loading dilatometry is used to measure the ratio of the densification strain rate to the creep strain rate and the continuous shrinkage history of the systems. The data show that the ratio of the densification to the creep strain rate is remarkably constant within a wide temperature range for densification, from the earliest stages of densification to at least the onset of the final stage. As a consequence, the sintering stress, which is proportional to the strain rate ratio, is nearly independent of sintered density or of temperature. Analysis leads to a simple method for determining the simultaneous densification strain rate over the creep strain rate ratio. A rigorous densification strain rate equation is derived for a model system. The constant sintering stress allows progress on formulating a sintering equation to predict the densification behavior of powder compacts. Analysis of dilatometry data from compacts sintered at various heating rates, more » and of numerical computations, indicate the need to include separate coarsening processes with different activation energies. The same model is used to describe the differences in pore spacing evolution between pre-coarsened and as-received systems. « less