Sintering behavior of iron nanopowder agglomerate compact prepared by slurry compaction method was investigated. The Fe nanopowder agglomerates were prepared by hydrogen reduction of spray dried agglomerates of ball-milled nanopowder at various reduction temperatures of , and , respectively. It was found that the Fe nanopowder agglomerates produced at higher reduction temperature have a higher green density compact which consists of more densified nanopowder agglomerates with coarsed nanopowders. The sintering behavior of the Fe nanopowder agglomerates strongly depended on the powder packing density in the compact and microstructure of the agglomerated nanopowder. It was discussed in terms of two sintering factors affecting the entire densification process of the compact.

Successful implementation of the powder forming process requires a detailed understanding of several interacting phenomena. The aim is to better control the process variables and to optimize the design parameters. A number of studies were carried out using various constitutive models that take the density change during powder forming into account. Most of them were developed for powders and sintered porous metals, but few of them can describe powder agglomerates, whose behaviour is different from that of uniformly arranged powders. The modification is needed to account for the effect of agglomeration on densification behaviour. Incorporating powder agglomeration into a constitutive model is of considerable importance, as it provides a possibility of relating the powder densification response to microstructural characteristics of powder particles, especially in case of nano powders. In this paper, we proposed a new powder agglomerate model in order to describe the unique densification behaviour of nano powders. The proposed model was applied to the densification of powder agglomerates during cold isostatic pressing.