ツール走査型摩擦粉末焼結法によるポーラスアルミニウムの作製

抄録

Porous aluminum was fabricated by tool-traversing friction powder sintering process with the sintering and dissolution process (SDP). In this process, the starting material was a mixture of aluminum powder and sodium chloride (NaCl) as spacer particles. After the powder mixture was placed in a mold, compaction and sintering was conducted only by the traversing of a rotating tool as in friction stir welding. Namely, no external heat source was necessary for the fabrication of porous aluminum, except for the friction heat generated by the traversing of the tool. In this study, porous aluminum with porosities of 60%, 70% and 80%, and a length equal to the tool traversing length was successfully fabricated. By X-ray computed tomography (CT) and scanning electron microscope (SEM) observations of the pore distribution and shapes, it was found that fabricated porous aluminum had a uniform pore distribution with pore shapes similar to the NaCl morphology, regardless of the porosity and the position along the tool traversing direction. In a compression test, the fabricated porous aluminum was observed to exhibit ductile fracture behavior, indicating that the aluminum powder was sufficiently sintered. The fabricated porous aluminum had almost the same plateau stress regardless of the position along the tool traversing direction for each porosity.