Powder metallurgy applied rapid heating to sintering starting year 1900. Since 1970 the study has intensified. Now rapid sintering concepts embrace a spectrum of options ranging from dunk cycles to microwave, induction, exothermic, electric field, and spark approaches. Most of the efforts are targeting reduced microstructure coarsening during sintering, although reduced material decomposition is another common goal. The efforts are impressive for simple shapes and success metrics such a small grain size after densification. Several barriers need to be removed prior to application in powder metallurgy commercial sintering. Rapid heating research needs to focus on significant property gains, accurate product dimensions, and lower costs. So far each property gain obtained with rapid heating is matched by traditional sintering and composition changes. Several examples are cited to show the goals for the next round of innovations.

Discrete element analysis is used to map various log-normal particle size distributions into measures of the in-sphere pore size distribution. Combinations evaluated range from monosized spheres to include bimodal mixtures and various log-normal distributions. The latter proves most useful in providing a mapping of one distribution into the other (knowing the particle size distribution we want to predict the pore size distribution). Such metrics show predictions where the presence of large pores is anticipated that need to be avoided to ensure high sintered properties.

Thermal management technology is a critical element in all new chip generations, caused by a power multiplication combined with a size reduction. A heat sink, mounted on a base plate, requires the use of special materials possessing both high thermal conductivity (TC) and a coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE) that matches semiconductor materials as well as certain packaging ceramics. In this study, nano tungsten coated copper powder has been developed with a wide range of compositions, 90W-10Cu to 10W-90Cu. Powder technologies were used to make samples to evaluate density, TC, and CTE. Measured TC lies among theoretical values predicted by several existing models.

Nano-structured tungsten carbide compacts with cobalt matrices (WC-Co) offer new opportunities for achieving superior hardness and toughness combinations. A unified modeling and simulation tool has been developed to produce maps of sintering pathways from nanocrystalline WC powder to sintered nano-structured WC-Co compacts. This tool includes (1) die compaction, (2) grain growth, (3) densification, (4) sensitivity analysis, and (5) optimization. All material parameters were obtained by curve fitting based on results with two WC-Co powders. Critical processing parameters are determined based on sensitivity analysis and are optimized to minimize grain size with high density.

Powder injection molding (PIM) is a suitable technology for the fabrication of complex shape titanium and its alloys, and has a great potential in many applications. This paper dealt with the injection molding of hydride dehydrogenization (HDH) titanium powder, spheroidized HDH titanium powder and gas atomized titanium powder. Rheological and thermalgravimetric behaviors were compared between the feedstocks of the three powders, and a tentative application of Ti PIM to eye frame temple and bridge was briefed.

Production components fabricated by metal powder injection molding are analyzed for features to identify the design window for this powder technology. This reverse approach lets the designer see where PIM has a high probability to succeed. The findings show that the most suitable components tend to be less than 25 mm in size and less than 10 g in mass, are slender, and have high complexity.

The master sintering curve (MSC) is derived from densification data over a range of heating rates and temperatures. To improve the accuracy, several modifications were proposed: multi-phase MSC for solid state sintering with phase changes, MSC for liquid phase sintering, and MSC with consideration of grain growth. The developed MSC models were applied to several material systems such as molybdenum, stainless steels, and tungsten heavy alloys (WHA), in order to evaluate the effect of compaction pressure, phase change, grain growth, and composition on densification, to classify regions having different sintering mechanism, and to help engineer design, optimize, and monitor sintering cycles.

In recent years, micro powder injection molding is being explored as an economical fabrication method for microcomponents in microsystems technology (MST). Technical and economic comparison was performed for processes. Molding experiment and simulation during the filling process were performed to evaluate several different geometries and processing conditions. The influence of material parameters and process conditions on mold filling were examined as a function of features size using microchannels as an example. It was found that the heat conductivity and viscosity of feedstock, geometry and mold temperature were the most critical parameters for complete filling of micro features.