Novel sintering strategy for the competitive manufacturing of the high-performance PM components

Research Project, 2013 – 2016

Objective and Goal Powder metallurgy (PM) is a resource and energy efficient way of transforming raw material into advanced components, provides great product design flexibility and basically unlimited alloy design capability. The aim of the project proposal is to develop new combinations of manufacturing steps resulting in technology that will bring significant improvement of the properties of the existing PM materials as well as allow development of new PM alloys. This will allow expansion of the areas of applications of PM components (e.g. heavy trucks, novel materials for HT applications, etc). Result and Expected Effects The projects aims on elaboration of new niches for growth of powder metallurgy technology as the most green component manufacturing technology existing up to date through synergies of alloy design and development of critical processing stages as well as overall process. The project focuses on development of new alloying systems, lean sintering atmospheres and vacuum sintering/heat treatment process for water-atomised materials as well as densification through sinter and hot isostatic pressing (HIP) without encapsulation. Approach and Implementation The project will address the materials development and manufacturing technology that will open new areas of the application. These are: i) lean alloys as well as robust manufacturing route for high-performance components for highly-loaded applications based on low-alloy PM steels; ii) application of the multi-step high-tech manufacturing route for the near-net shape components with high performance and tolerance including new HIP approaches. Through the project specific demonstrators (material, physical product, process optimization, etc) will be facilitated.