The purpose of the present study is to investigate the method decreasing debinding time as well as lowering operation condition than pure supercritical debinding by using cosolvent or binary mixture of propane + . First method is to add cosolvent, such as n-hexane, DCM, methanol, 1-butanol, in supercritical . In case of adding cosolvent, we were found the addition of non-polar cosolvent (n-hexane) improves dramatically the binder removal rate (more than 2 times) compared with pure supercritical debinding, second method is to use mixture of supercritical propane + , as solvent. In case of using mixture of supercritical propane + , the rate of debinding speeded up with increasing of pressure and concentration of propane at 348.15 K. It was found that addition of cosolvent (e.g., n-hexane, DCM) and binary mixture propane + for supercritical solvent remarkably improved binder removal rate for the paraffin wax-based binder system, in comparison with using pure supercritical .

Defining the relationship between the quality of injection molded parts and the process condition is very complicate because of lots of factor are involved and each factor has a non-linearity. With the development of CAE(Computer Aided Engineering) technology, the estimation of volumetric shrinkage of injection mold parts is possible by computer simulation even though restricted application. In this research, the Taguchi method and Neural Network applied for finding optimal processing condition. The percent of volumetric shrinkage compared on each case and show neural network can be successfully applied.

CAE technology is an integrated tool including all aspects such as powder, binder system, mixing, injection molding, debinding and sintering. Therefore, CAE technology is considered as one of core technologies for PIM industry in the future. Recently many researchers are developing not only CAE software itself but also application procedures of CAE software. In this study, the applications for CAE technology in PIM industry are presented including feedstock mixing effect, several cases of troubleshooting and optimization procedure.

In this paper we presented numerical method for the simulation of powder injection molding filling process, which is one of the key processes in powder injection molding. Rheological properties of powder binder mixture such as slip phenomena and yield stress were introduced into the numerical analysis model of powder injection molding filling simulation. Numerical model can be classified into two types. One is 2.5D model which can be introduced to a arbitrary thin geometry and the other is full 3D model which can be applied to a general 3D shape. For 2.5D model we showed the validity of our CAE system with several verification examples. Finally we suggested flow analysis model for 3D powder injection molding filling simulation.

An investigation was performed to apply the M3/2 grade high speed steel for metal injection molding using both prealloyed and elementally blended powders. The injected samples were subjected to a debinding step in gas atmosphere at a ratio that affected the carbon content of the material. The carbon content ranged from 1.4wt.% to 1.43wt%. with increasing content up to 80% in atmosphere for the prealloyed powders. The carbon contents of the elementally blended powders exhibited 1.44wt.% and 1.62wt.% at 10% and 20% gas, respectively. This level decreased to 0.17wt.% upon increasing the content. The sintered density of both powders increased rapidly as the temperature reached the liquid phase forming temperature. After forming the liquid phase, the density rapidly increased to the optimum sintering temperature for the prealloyed powders, whereas the density of mixed elemental powders goes up slowly to the optimum sintering temperature. The optimum sintering temperature and density are 126 and 97.3% for the prealloyed powders and 128 and 96.9% for the elementally blended powders, respectively. The microstructure of the specimen at the optimum sintering temperature consisted of fine grains with primary carbides of MC and type for the prealloyed powders. The elementally blended powders exhibited coarse grains with eutectic carbides of MC, and type.