The densification behavior of metals and alloys during spark plasma sintering: A mini-review

As of today, metals and alloys are widely utilized as structural, mechanical, electrical, and magnetic materials in every aspect of technology and industry. The complexity and diversity of metals applications emphasize the need for a new production method to quickly and easily manufacture metallic components. Spark plasma sintering as a new solid-state sintering method has been recently developed to respond to these needs. Up to now, numerous papers and researches have been published in the field of spark plasma sintering and its ability to manufacture metallic samples. Density is a significant property that has a great influence on the physical, mechanical, and functional properties of metallic parts. To the best of our knowledge, there is no concrete paper that reviews the densification behavior of metals and alloys during spark plasma sintering and the effect of its parameters on the density of metallic samples. As a result, this article dedicated to addressing this need. In this mini-review, after a short description of spark plasma sintering method, the effects of each sintering parameters on densification behavior of metals and alloys are studied, and possible physical and microstructural factors which have the effect of densification behavior of metallic samples at various sintering conditions are reviewed. Finally, the recent advances in finite element modeling, which study the temperature and stress inhomogeneity in the SPS process, have been reviewed in this paper.