Alumina microcomponents have distinguishing advantages over Si counterpart. However, the shrinkage of alumina, as high as 20%, makes it difficult to produce precision components meeting a high tolerance. A new fabrication process presented to greatly reduce the shrinkage by producing alumina microcomponents from ultrafine Al powder. The process consists of forming Al powder components through sintering and turning the Al powder component into alumina. In this way, the shrinkage occurring in sintering the Al powder component will be compensated by the expansion appearing when the Al powder component turns into alumina. The process has proven successful.

A new method has been developed to fabricate microcomponents by a combination of photolithography and sintering of metallic powder mixtures, without the need for compression and the addition of Mg. This involves (1) the fabrication of a micromould, (2) mould filling of the powder/binder mixture, (3) debinding and (3) sintering. The starting powdered materials consisted of a mixture of aluminium powder(average size of 2.5 um) and alloying elemental powder of Cu and Sn(less than 70nm), at appropriate proportions to achieve nominal compositions of Al-6wt%Cu, Al-6wt%Cu-3wt%Sn. This paper presents detailed investigation of debinding behaviour and microstructural development.

The increasing demand for automotive industries to reduce the weight of the vehicles has led to a growing usage of Al alloy powder metallurgy (P/M) parts. In order to control the sintered microstructure and mechanical properties of the aluminium alloy powder metallurgical (P/M) parts, it is essential to establish a fundamental understanding of the microstructural development during the sintering process. This paper presents a detailed study of the effect of temperature and initial starting materials on the evolution of microstructure during the sintering of Al-Cu-Mg-Si blends for PM.

With the onging trend of weight saving in automobiles, the application of light alloys is increasing. Recently, aluminum powder metallurgy has been the subject of renewed attention due to the combination of lightweight of aluminium and the efficient material utilisation of the powder metallurgical process, which offer attractive benefits to potential end-users. This study is to explore the use of warm compaction process to aluminium powder metallurgy. This paper presents a detailed study of the effect of warm compression and sintering conditions on the resultant microstructures and mechanical properties of Al-Cu-Mg-Si PM blend.