Design of low-melting point compositions suitable for transient liquid phase sintering of PM steels based on a thermodynamic and kinetic study

Journal article, 2014

The possibility of tailoring the characteristics of a liquid metal is an important asset in a wide number of processing techniques. For most of these processes, the nature and degree of the interaction between liquid and solid phases are usually a focus of interest since they determine liquid properties such as wettability and infiltration capacity. Particularly, within the Powder Metallurgy (PM) technology, it is considered one of the key aspects to obtain high performance steels through liquid phase sintering. In this work, it is proved how thermodynamic and kinetics software are a powerful tool to study the liquid/solid interactions. The assessment of different liquid phase promoters for transient liquid phase sintering is addressed through the use of ThermoCalc and DICTRA calculations. Besides melting temperatures, particular attention is given to the solubility phenomena between the phases and the kinetics of these processes. Experimental validation of thermodynamic results is carried out by wetting and infiltration experiments at high temperatures. Compositions presenting different liquid/solid solubility are evaluated and directly correlated to the behavior of the liquid during a real sintering process. Therefore, this work opens the possibility to optimize liquid phase compositions and predict the liquid behavior from the design step, which is considered of high technological value for the PM industry.