Full density powder metal components through Hot Isostatic Pressing

• Published in: Metal powder report Vol. 72; no. 2; pp. 107 - 110
• Main Authors: Flodin, Anders, Andersson, Michael, Miedzinski, Artur
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier Ltd 01.03.2017
• ISSN: 0026-0657; 1873-4065
• DOI: 10.1016/j.mprp.2016.02.057

Powder metal (PM) components are widely used in automotive industry, usually because of lower parts price. Due to the inherent porosity in PM steel parts that have been produced through compaction and sintering, will mechanical properties are lower than for a similarly alloyed solid steel part. The lower mechanical properties are of course addressed by the PM industry and there are different technologies to improve the strength of the PM parts. All of these technologies have a cost associated with them, the question is where the development engineers get the most Mega-Pascal increase for the money and how much performance does the final product actually need? The mechanics explaining the behavior of the PM material is that the pores act as defects and crack initiators. The solution is to make the pores smaller, fewer, more spherical or completely remove them. In this article the processes for performance boosting of PM component will be discussed in general and the process developed by the authors involving Hot Isostatic Pressing (HIP) will be discussed in more detail. The most common methods for pore removal are powder forging, shot peening and surface densification by rolling. They all have their pros and cons, which are discussed in this article as well as how Hot Isostatic Pressing (HIP) fits in, and what the HIP process does to the PM material.