Cracking during sintering is a common problem in powder processing and is usually caused by constraint that prevents the sintering material from shrinking in one or more directions. Different factors influence sintering‐induced cracking, including temperature schedule, packing density, and specimen geometry. Here we use the discrete element method to directly observe the stress distribution and sinter‐cracking behavior in edge notched panels sintered under a uniaxial restraint. This geometry allows an easy comparison with traditional fracture mechanics parameters, facilitating analysis of sinter‐cracking behavior. We find that cracking caused by self‐stress during sintering resembles the growth of creep cracks in fully dense materials. By deriving the constrained densification rate from the appropriate constitutive equations, we discover that linear shrinkage transverse to the loading axis is accelerated by a contribution from the effective Poisson's ratio of a sintering solid. Simulation of different notch geometries and initial relative densities reveals conditions that favor densification and minimize crack growth, alluding to design methods for avoiding cracking in actual sintering processes. We combine the far‐field stress and crack length to compute the net section stress, finding that it characterizes the stress profile between the notches and correlates with the sinter‐crack growth rate, demonstrating its potential to quantitatively describe sinter‐cracking.
The effectiveness of published continuum constitutive laws to predict stress‐assisted densification of powder compacts
Commonly used constitutive laws for crystalline and viscous materials have been compared to predict the densification behavior under hot‐pressing and sinter‐forging. Experimental results, from literature for one loading condition, have been used to extract the constitutive laws for amorphous and crystalline materials and, these in‐turn, have been used to predict behavior under a different set of loading conditions. Ideally, the constitutive parameters obtained from one set of loading conditions and thermal history should apply to a different set of conditions. However, there is a lack of systematic experimental studies in which this can be checked. In this paper, we use constitutive parameters obtained from one set of conditions to predict the densification response under a different set of loading conditions. For both sintering of amorphous and crystalline materials, we use two different constitutive parameters and compare the predictions of these for the case where experimental results are not available. In addition, the effect of temperature on densification behavior for stress‐assisted sintering has been investigated. It is shown that the two commonly used constitutive models for viscous sintering (Scherer and Skorohod–Olevsky) predict similar behavior for amorphous materials. However, for crystalline materials, the predictions of the Riedel–Svoboda and the Kuhn–Sofronis–McMeeking (KSM) models are different. Finally, it is shown that the dependence of the normalized densification on temperature, under constant heating rate conditions, with parameters obtained from isothermal experiments, is a good test for the models.
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- PAR ID:
- 10544450
- Publisher / Repository:
- American Ceramic Society, Wiley-Blackwell
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of the American Ceramic Society
- Volume:
- 106
- Issue:
- 3
- ISSN:
- 0002-7820
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1653-1667
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1111/jace.18840
