3D Phase-Field Simulation and Characterization of Microstructure Evolution during Liquid Phase Sintering

2014 ◽  
Vol 87 ◽  
pp. 132-138 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hamed Ravash ◽  
Eckard Specht ◽  
Jef Vleugels ◽  
Nele Moelans

Liquid phase sintering (LPS) is widely used as a materials processing technique for hightemperature applications. In LPS, particle-particle contact size and distribution, 3-D coordination number, connectivity, and contiguity are important microstructure parameters which, to a large extent, determine the mechanical properties of the sintered materials. These features all depend on the grain size, solid volume fraction and dihedral angle during sintering. The dihedral angle is an important parameter in LPS. It is the angle formed between the 2 solid-liquid interfaces at the intersection of a grain boundary with the liquid. A higher solid volume fraction, on the other hand, favors a larger 3-D coordination number, connectivity, and contiguity. In practice, studying the correlation between these parameters and direct measurement of them is not a trivial task. Among them, 3-D measurement of dihedral angle is believed to be the most challenging one. In the current study, phase-field modeling is employed to simulate LPS in two phase systems (solid and liquid). Simulations are performed for the different ratios of grain boundary to solid-liquid energies and the different solid volume fractions. To create initial structures with high solid volume fraction, an advanced particle packing algorithm is employed. An extended sparse bounding-box algorithm is used to speed-up the computations and makes it computationally efficient for 3-D simulations. Contiguity, connectivity, and three dimensional coordination number were measured in the self similar regime. The results were compared with empirical rules and experimental data and are used to estimate the mean 3-D dihedral angle.

Energies ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (23) ◽  
pp. 4474 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hamidreza Shabgard ◽  
Weiwei Zhu ◽  
Amir Faghri

A mathematical model based on the integral method is developed to solve the problem of conduction-controlled solid–liquid phase change in annular geometries with temperature gradients in both phases. The inner and outer boundaries of the annulus were subject to convective, constant temperature or adiabatic boundary conditions. The developed model was validated by comparison with control volume-based computational results using the temperature-transforming phase change model, and an excellent agreement was achieved. The model was used to conduct parametric studies on the effect of annuli geometry, thermophysical properties of the phase change materials (PCM), and thermal boundary conditions on the dynamics of phase change. For an initially liquid PCM, it was found that increasing the radii ratio increased the total solidification time. Also, increasing the Biot number at the cooled (heated) boundary and Stefan number of the solid (liquid) PCM, decreased (increased) the solidification time and resulted in a greater (smaller) solid volume fraction at steady state. The application of the developed method was demonstrated by design and analysis of a PCM–air heat exchanger for HVAC systems. The model can also be easily employed for design and optimization of annular PCM systems for all associated applications in a fraction of time needed for computational simulations.


2007 ◽  
Vol 534-536 ◽  
pp. 609-612
Author(s):  
Jong K. Lee ◽  
Lei Xu ◽  
Shu Zu Lu

When an alloy such as Ni-W is liquid phase sintered, heavy solid W particles sedimentate to the bottom of the container, provided that their volume fraction is less than a critical value. The sintering process evolves typically in two stages, diffusion-driven macrosegregation sedimentation followed by true sedimentation. During sedimentation, the overall solid volume fraction decreases concurrently with elimination of liquid concentration gradient. However, in the second stage of true sedimentation, the average solid volume fraction in the mushy zone increases with time, and oddly, no concentration gradient is necessary in the liquid zone. In this work, we propose that the true sedimentation results from particle rearrangement for higher packing efficiency.


2007 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 249-258
Author(s):  
E. Khomenko ◽  
A. Ragulya ◽  
N. Lesnik ◽  
R. Minakova

Features of the microstructure formation of Cr-Cu composites under impregnation followed by liquid phase sintering of reduced and electrolytic chromium powders at 1200?C in a vacuum of (2-4)?10-3Pa have been studied. The refractory component particle size distribution in the microstructure of samples with reduced chromium sintered for 60 min is shown to obey a normal logarithmic law; with distribution parameters being sensitive to the volume fraction of the refractory particles. The calculated values of the dihedral angle are close to the value of one of the modes in the experimental dihedral angle distribution for the microstructure of electrolytic chromium based samples (115?). The interfacial and interparticle surface energies ratio ?sl/?ss>0.5 is shown to correspond to theory for the Crs-Cul system in equilibrium, which indicates the presence of skeleton structure elements in the course of composition formation under liquid phase sintering (including the case of excess liquid phase). Experimentally determined interparticle and interfacial surface areas, solid particle contiguity and continuity are discussed in terms of concurrent diffusion-controlled particle coarsening (in Lifshitz, Slyozov and Wagner theory) and particle coalescence (in German?s model). The kinetics of shrinkage for the composites with 50...55 % solid-phase volume-fractions at heating and isothermal sintering in a vacuum at a temperature of 1200?C in terms of linearly viscous rheological theory are discussed.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Wilms ◽  
Jan Wieringa ◽  
Theo Blijdenstein ◽  
Kees van Malssen ◽  
Reinhard Kohlus

AbstractThe rheological characterization of concentrated suspensions is complicated by the heterogeneous nature of their flow. In this contribution, the shear viscosity and wall slip velocity are quantified for highly concentrated suspensions (solid volume fractions of 0.55–0.60, D4,3 ~ 5 µm). The shear viscosity was determined using a high-pressure capillary rheometer equipped with a 3D-printed die that has a grooved surface of the internal flow channel. The wall slip velocity was then calculated from the difference between the apparent shear rates through a rough and smooth die, at identical wall shear stress. The influence of liquid phase rheology on the wall slip velocity was investigated by using different thickeners, resulting in different degrees of shear rate dependency, i.e. the flow indices varied between 0.20 and 1.00. The wall slip velocity scaled with the flow index of the liquid phase at a solid volume fraction of 0.60 and showed increasingly large deviations with decreasing solid volume fraction. It is hypothesized that these deviations are related to shear-induced migration of solids and macromolecules due to the large shear stress and shear rate gradients.


2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alcides J. Sitoe ◽  
Franco Pretorius ◽  
Walter W. Focke ◽  
René Androsch ◽  
Elizabeth L. du Toit

Abstract A novel method for estimating the upper critical solution temperature (UCST) of N,N-diethyl-m-toluamide (DEET)-polyethylene systems was developed. It was validated using data for the dimethylacetamide (DMA)-alkane systems which showed that refractive index mixing rules, linear in volume fraction, can accurately predict mixture composition for amide-alkane systems. Furthermore, rescaling the composition descriptor with a single adjustable parameter proved adequate to address any asymmetry when modeling the DMA-alkane phase envelopes. This allowed the translation of measured refractive index cooling trajectories of DEET-alkane systems into phase diagrams and facilitated the estimation of the UCST values by fitting the data with an adjusted composition descriptor model. For both the DEET- and DMA-alkane systems, linear behavior of UCST values in either the Flory–Huggins critical interaction parameter, or the alkane critical temperature, with increasing alkane molar mass is evident. The UCST values for polymer diluent systems were estimated by extrapolation using these two complimentary approaches. For the DEET-polyethylene system, values of 183.4 and 180.1 °C respectively were obtained. Both estimates are significantly higher than the melting temperature range of polyethylene. Initial liquid–liquid phase separation is therefore likely to be responsible for the previously reported microporous microstructure of materials formed from this binary system.


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