2D Phase field modeling of sintering of silver nanoparticles

The sintering mechanism of silver nanoparticles is modeled by incorporating surface, volume and grain boundary diffusion in a phase field model. A direction-dependent tensorial mobility formulation is adopted, capturing the fact that diffusion mainly occurs along the directions tangential to the surface of the particle. A finite element framework is applied to solve the governing equations in a fully coupled implicit manner, and the developed framework is demonstrated for particle sintering of equal and unequal sizes as well as at different temperatures. The obtained results are compared with experimental observations, whereby it is shown that the developed material model adequately describes the sintering mechanism of silver nanoparticles.