Effect of Sintering Process Parameters in Metal Injection Molding (MIM) Process on Impact Toughness of Sintered Parts

Abstract

The identification of significant process parameters during sintering of brown parts in Metal Injection Moulding (MIM) is essential because improper control of these parameters can result poor parts. The controlled parameters used for optimization in this work include sintering temperature, heating rate, sintering time, cooling rate and sintering atmosphere. These parameters have been optimized using analysis of variance (ANOVA) for signal to noise ratios obtained in experiment performed by following Taguchi L₁₆ orthogonal array. The ANOVA also provides the contribution of significant process parameters to impact toughness. Results show that out of the five factors four are the significant factors. The sintering temperature (T_s) has a contribution of 23.64% at a confidence level of 95%, heating rate ( ) has a contribution of 9.76% at a confidence level of 95%, sintering time (t_s) has a contribution of 61.51% at a confidence level of 99%, cooling rate ( ) has a contribution of 3.82% with a confidence level of 90%, and sintering atmosphere is observed to be insignificant factor for impact energy absorbed by the specimen.