Constitutive Modeling Of Sintering Of Cemented Carbide Aiming For Robustness

During sintering, a green body of powder particles is heated to high temperatures, fusing the particles together. In cemented carbide production, the sintering process generally results in substantial densification of the material. By using a dilatometer, shrinkage during the sintering process can be measured. For a green body of lower density, early particle rearrangement has been observed. This is investigated here using different initial densities using the same powder, leading to a suggested addition to the constitutive model. The environment in the dilatometer and the sintering furnace differs, especially with respect to heating and temperature during holding. This effect can be minimized by creating robustness in the model, making it independent of the heating cycle. Here, this is done by optimizing the constitutive parameters towards four heating cycles for a specific powder.