Zg. Fang et Br. Patterson, EXPERIMENTAL INVESTIGATION OF PARTICLE-SIZE DISTRIBUTION INFLUENCE ONDIFFUSION-CONTROLLED COARSENING, Acta metallurgica et materialia, 41(7), 1993, pp. 2017-2024
The influence of initial particle size distribution on coarsening duri
ng liquid phase sintering has been experimentally investigated using W
-14Ni-6Fe alloy as a model system. It was found that initially wider s
ize distribution particles coarsened more rapidly than those of an ini
tially narrow distribution. The well known linear relationship between
the cube of the average particle radius, r3BAR, and time was observed
for most of the coarsening process, although the early stage coarseni
ng rate constant changed with time, as expected with concomitant early
changes in the tungsten particle size distribution. The instantaneous
transient rate constant was shown to be related to the geometric stan
dard deviation, lnsigma, of the instantaneous size distributions, with
higher rate constants corresponding to larger lnsigma values. The for
m of the particle size distributions changed rapidly during early coar
sening and reached a quasi-stable state, different from the theoretica
l asymptotic distribution, after some time. A linear relationship was
found between the experimentally observed instantaneous rate constant
and that computed from an earlier model incorporating the effect of pa
rticle size distribution. The above results compare favorably with tho
se from prior theoretical modeling and computer simulation studies of
the effect of particle size distribution on coarsening, based on the D
eHoff communicating neighbor model.