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.