Study on Improvement of Filling Structure and Functionality of Silver Clay Sintering Body

Abstract

“Art Clay Silver (Silver Clay)”, developed as a silver recycled product, is a mixture of fine powdered silver and binder for easily making silver accessories after sintering at 650°C. In this study, in order to find the optimum binder amount to maximize the strength of the sintered product, the filling structure of sintered Silver Clay was analyzed at various binder amounts under three particle size fractions (fine, coarse, and their equal weight mixture) on the basis of the measurements of porosity, shrinkage rate, strength, and pore size distribution together with SEM observation. As a result, we found that the filling structure was controlled by changing the particle size and the binder amount, and that the binder addition of 5–8% to fine particle fraction yielded the minimum porosity and maximum strength.