Microstructure quantification procedures in liquid-phase sintered materials

The quantification of sintered microstructures is an inherent part of powder metallurgy. Often a means to explain the effects of process variations with respect to sintered properties is needed. Quantification of grain size in the microstructure is an essential part of that effort. If satisfactory models exist, then the effort might be simple. Along those lines, three-dimensional grain size distributions can be obtained from two-dimensional grain section distributions by using a new forward transformation method. The technique is applied to sintered microstructures to verify the procedure, but the method is not limited to a particular material. A computer simulation program is developed. The initial three-dimensional grain size distributions are obtained from a backward method. The method can handle grains with different shapes, dihedral angles, and contact numbers. Both the Weibull and normal distribution functions are used to process the data. The results show that dihedral angle and contact number greatly affect the grain size distribution causing the three-dimensional grain size distribution to become narrower at high solid volume fractions.