New Method of Obtaining Volume, Grain-Boundary, and Surface Diffusion Coefficients from Sintering Data

Abstract

A sintering model is proposed by which all of the significant mechanisms of material transport may be identified, even though more than one mechanism may be operating simultaneously. For diffusion-controlled sintering it is possible to calculate both the volume and the grain-boundary diffusion coefficients from measurements of neck size, shrinkage, and shrinkage rate. Furthermore, the surface diffusion coefficient may be estimated through computer synthesis of the sintering curves. Preliminary results on iron and copper have yielded values of the diffusion coefficients which are in good agreement with those measured by other techniques.