MTE 449 Powder Metallurgy

Chapter 3
Mechanical Fabrication of powders

Nagy El-Kaddah
 Powder Fabrication
¾ Powder manufacturing revolves around transforming bulk materials into
finely dispersed pieces
¾ Powder manufacturing techniques
¾ Mechanical Comminution
¾ Chemical Synthesis
¾ Electrolytic deposition
¾ Liquid atomization
¾ Vapor Condensation
¾ Energy efficiency (actual energy consumption/surface energy of particles)
of these techniques is generally low, less than 5%.
¾ Selection Criteria
¾ Type and properties of the material
¾ Reactivity of the material
¾ Desired characteristics of the produced powder
¾ Rate of production and costs
 Mechanical Powder Fabrication
¾ Powder production methods
¾ Machining
¾ Uses shear forces to chip bulk materials
¾ Produced chips are quite large (mms in size)
¾ Impaction
¾ Disintegrate of bulk materials is by impact
¾ It produce powders in mm size range
¾ Attritioning
¾ It involves grinding the material with another a harder
material
¾ Produce fine particles in 1 to 100 mm size range
¾ Compression
¾ Involves compressing the material to its breaking point
¾ It is hardly used in powder fabrication

¾ Mechanical powder fabrication involves one or more

of these techniques
¾ Powders produced by mechanical techniques are
irregular in shape.
 Machining
¾ Metalworking by traditional metal cutting processes such as
turning on a lathe, and drilling produces large powder as a
byproduct
¾ It is the cheapest method for producing large quantities of
powders
¾ It lacks control of particle size and shape, and material
structure.
¾ Powders produced by this method is generally not suitable for
powder processing
¾ They are used as the feed material for other mechanical
fabrication processes
 Impaction Processes
¾ Principles
¾ Particle crushing by impact is caused by crack propagation of internal
defects in the particles
¾ The impact stress for crushing a particle depends on the defect size (r)
and the diameter of the particle.
1/ 2
⎛2Er ⎞
σ =⎜ ⎟
⎝ D ⎠

¾ Since the impact stress for crushing the particles increases with
decreasing particle diameter, for a given impaction forces in a system,
there is a critical size below which the particles can’t be crushed no
matter how long the system is operated.
¾ The specific energy required for crushing particles of initial size DI to
final size DF can be estimated from the following empirical equation
⎛ 1 1 ⎞
W = g ⎜⎜ 2 − 2 ⎟⎟
⎝ DF DI ⎠
where g is a constant
 Impaction Processes (cont.)
¾ Milling
¾ Milling refers to processes that use hard balls and rods to fracture particulate
materials upon collision.
¾ It is used for crushing brittle materials, such as carbides, oxides and
intermetallics or embrittled metals such as saturated niobium with hydrogen.
¾ The crushing system is essentially a cylindrical
drum filled with balls or rods and the material
and the drum rotates to produce collisions
between falling balls and particles
¾ The key process parameter is rotation speed
¾ Slow rotation cause the balls to roll resulting in
low impact forces
¾ Fast rotation cause the balls to stick on the wall
of the drum by centrifugal forces.
 Impaction Techniques (cont.)
¾ Milling (cont.)
¾ Optimal operating conditions
¾ The ratio of ball to powder diameter should be at least 30.
¾ The balls must fill half the drum
¾ The ratio of balls to powder volume is should be about 2
¾ Disadvantages of milling
¾ Produced powder are irregular in shape and exhibit poor flow and packing
characteristics
¾ Contamination of the powder from the drum and balls

¾ Other impaction processes

¾ Jet Milling
¾ In this process impact forces is generated by impinging a high velocity
particles jet (supersonic) on the surface of a hard plate.
¾ Self-impact Jet Milling
¾ In this techniques two high speed jets of powders are directed at one another
 Attritioning and Mechanical Alloying
¾ The approach for grinding of the particles is
by stirring the feed particles and hard balls in a
cylindrical container
¾ The stirring time depends on
¾ Stirrer design
¾ Rotational speed of the impeller (N)
¾ Diameter of grinding balls (d)
d2
t = C 1/ 2
N
¾ The stirring action of this process made it
suitable for homogenizing different powder
materials
¾ The friction force also promotes cold welding
of different particulate materials
¾ All these factors made this process the
principal technology for mechanical alloying
and for production of composite materials