Abstract
Superalloy has been used for aerospace application because of their excellent attributes of high strength and corrosion resistance at high temperature. Inconel 718 is one of the representative Ni-based superalloy. Generally, superalloy has poor workability, especially high tool wear by machining, so that it is not easy to produce the components of complex shaped parts at low cost. To overcome such as the problem, metal injection molding (MIM) process would be a useful technique which offers net shape production, high design flexibility, and high cost efficiency for mass production. In this study, gas-atomized fine alloy powder of Inconel 718 was prepared for MIM process, and the mechanical properties of injection molded compacts were investigated. The relative density over 99.7 %, which is much higher than density of usual MIM compacts, was obtained by supersolidious liquid-phase sintering. Furthermore, injection molded Inconel 718 showed high fatigue strength comparable to the wrought materials, because the pore size of the MIM compacts was smaller than the inclusion size of wrought materials. And it was found that the grain size was more dominant than pore size against the fatigue failure of MIM Inconel 718 with near full density.
