Constitutive modelling of microstructured components fabricated by micro powder injection molding.pdf

Available online at /locate/actamat Acta Materialia 56 (2008) 5560–5566Constitutive modelling of microstructured components fabricated by micro powder injection molding L. Liu a,*, N.H. Loh a, B.Y. Tay b, S.B. Tor a, Y. Murakoshi c, R. Maeda c aSchool of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, 50 Nanyang Avenue, Singapore 639798, Singapore bSingapore Institute of Manufacturing Technology, 71 Nanyang Drive, Singapore 638075, Singapore cAdvanced Manufacturing Research Institute, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), 1-2 Namiki, Tsukuba, Japan Received 28 May 2008; received in revised form 5 July 2008; accepted 19 July 2008 Available online 14 September 2008Abstract A constitutive model based on Besson and Abouaf’s constitutive equation was established to simulate densification of 316L stainless steel microstructured components fabricated by micro powder injection molding. A new sintering stress expression for final stage sinter- ing was established by including the variation in grain number during grain growth. Different diffusional creep, sintering stress and inter- nal gas pressure were assumed for the substructure, in the millimeter regime, and the microsize structures, respectively. The predictive capability of the model was verified by comparing the theoretical calculations with the experimental results. The calculations agreed reasonably well with the experimental results. Neglecting the variation in grain number in the sintering stress was found to yield lower predicted densities of the microsize structures.  2008 Acta Materialia Inc. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Constitutive modeling; Sintering; Micro powder injection molding; Porosity; Grain growth1. Introduction Microstructured components, which have dimensions in the millimeter range as well as micrometer-sized three- dimension functional units on their surfaces, are widely used in fields such as analytics and d