Specific Surface Area Evolution and Shrinkage Control of Pre-Sintered Nickel Clusters

Abstract

This study prepared pre-sintered clusters with fine nickel powders and proposed an effective method to predict and control the sintering shrinkage based on cluster size. Experiments were conducted to investigate the influence of the pre-sintering temperature and cluster size on the specific surface area and morphology of pre-sintered clusters as well as to validate the availability of the proposed shrinkage prediction method. The results show that the specific surface area decreases with an increasing pre-sintering temperature and slightly oscillates with an increasing cluster size. The linear shrinkage ratio is inversely proportional to the cluster size and decreases with an increasing pre-sintering temperature, which begins to drop rapidly at 500 °C and decreases from 19.05% to 3.18% at 800 °C. The experimental results are quite approximate to the predicted values, which strongly prove the availability of the proposed shrinkage prediction method.