Production and properties comparison of materials produced by conventional and microwave sintering of iron based powder compacts

Sintering is one of the most important step of Powder Metallurgy. Sintering is a heat treatment where strength is gained as a result of densification by joining of particles via heating compacts. This step where final properties of compacts are gained is also a process that most of energy and time is used. Works done of late years showed that used energy and time can be reduced and mechanical properties can be improved by using microwave energy in sintering of powder metallurgy compacts. Focusing to the effect of microwave energy, iron and iron alloys which are the most common engineered materials are used in this work. In this context, Fe, several amounts of Cu mixed Fe-Cu, several amounts of bronze alloy mixed Fe-bronze, 316L, several amounts of Cu mixed 316L-Cu, several amounts of bronze alloy mixed 316L-bronze compacts are sintered by conventionally and microwave energy. 3-point bending samples are used to determine the effect of these two methods which are applied to iron alloy compacts of several compositions. Volume change by dimension, porosity amount by mercury porosimeter, bending strength and bending amount by 3-point bending test, microstructural and morphological properties by optical microscope and scanning electron microscope (SEM) and elemental change in the structure by energy dispersive spectrometer are determined by characterization studies. The results showed that mechanical properties of iron based compacts by using microwave energy are beter than conventionally sintered ones.