Sintering by intense thermal radiation (SITR): A study of temperature distribution by simulation and experiments

The modeling and a confirming experimental study of a sintering process by using intense thermal radiation (SITR) is demonstrated. Experiments were conducted in a modified spark plasma sintering set-up for the purpose of rapid consolidation of porous SiC ceramics. A finite element method based software package, COMSOL Multiphysics, was employed to simulate the temperature distributions with two different die geometries. Experimental verifications were performed by sintering of SiC foams and measuring the temperature differences between two fixed points on the die and samples at 1000–1800 °C. SiC foams sintered under two geometries with 10 min’ dwell resulted in the formation of grain necks. The compressive strengths are 19.2 ± 0.7 MPa (65.0 ± 0.1 vol% porosity) and 15.3 ± 1.9 MPa (69.0 ± 0.3 vol% porosity), respectively. The simulation and experimental results showed that the temperature distributions are strongly related to these geometries.