Gas filtration at high temperature from industrial processes offers various advantages such as increasing process efficiency, improving heat recovery and materials resource recovery, etc. At the same time, it is an advanced environment protection technology. This paper describes a newly developed metallic filter element. The manufacturing process of sintered metallic powder and the mechanical and filtration characteristics of this filter element were investigated. In this work, the phase constituent changes of the powder during sintering were studied. The newly developed filter elements were found to have excellent corrosion resistance, good thermal resistance, high strength and high filtration efficiency.

In most of sintered metal powder compacts, the sintered density distribution is controlled to be as high and uniform as possible to ensure the required mechanical properties. In general, the density distribution in the compacts is not uniform and not easy to measure. In the present study, a method for measuring the density distribution was developed, based on the indentation force equation by which the hardness and the relative density were related. The indentation force equation, expressed as a function of strength constant, workhardening coefficient and relative density, was obtained by finite element analysis of rigid-ball indentation on sintered powder metal compacts. The present method was verified by comparing the predicted density distribution in the sintered Fe-0.5%C-2%Cu compacts with that obtained by experiments, in which the density distribution was directly measured by machining the compacts from the outer surface progressively.