PM recent developments focus on increasing this technology's competitiveness when compared to wrought materials. Warm compaction allows the replacement of a double press double sinter process with a single warm press and sintering step, thus allowing cost and time savings. Moreover there are added benefits to consider such as reducing work in process and lessening part's logistics cost. This paper presents a successful industrial trial to replace a double press-double sinter process with a warm die compaction and sintering process. The part chosen was a high performance gear containing 0,9% wt. carbon. Sintering was conducted in a belt furnace at in a nitrogen rich atmosphere with rapid cooling process in order to obtain a quasi fully martensitic structure with a minimum of 700HV0,1 and 450HV10 after annealing. The balance between properties and cost is favoured by the use of a singular lubricant developed in a Eureka frame project together with POMETON S.A. and die warm compaction. Warm compaction is only needed to be effective on the gear teeth, in order to achieve the required properties. Therefore only the die is actually heated. This simplified system avoids flow rate problems typically involved when using more elaborate warm compaction equipments.

The high pressure compaction without internal lubricant and the high green density even with the pore free density were achieved by the newly developed die wall lubricant for warm compaction. This developed die wall lubricated warm compaction followed by high temperature sintering resulted in not only the superior mechanical property but also the low dimensional change. In this paper, the effects of increasing the green density on the sintered density, the dimensional change and the mechanical property are mainly discussed