Research Article

Effects of sintering temperature on the densification of WC-6Co cemented carbides sintered by coupled multi-physical-fields activated technology

¹ School of Manufacturing Science and Engineering, Sichuan University, 610065 Chengdu, China
² Department of Design, Manufacture & Engineering Management, University of Strathclyd, G1 1XQ Glasgow, UK

^* e-mail: yiyang_scu@163.com
^** e-mail: liujian@scu.edu.cn

Received: 6 January 2015
Accepted: 25 June 2015

Abstract

Sample parts with WC-6Co cemented carbides were manufactured successfully with a novel method called coupled multi-physical-fields (electric field, temperature field and force field) activated sintering technology, using a Gleeble-1500D thermal simulation machine. Effects of sintering temperature on the densification, microstructures and hardness of samples were investigated. It was found that densification of the samples was enhanced with the increase of the sintering temperature and a relative density of as high as 98.76% achieved when a sintering temperature of 1200 °C was used. The particle size of the WC in sintered samples increased from 1.837 μm to 2.897 μm when the temperature was increased from 1000 °C to 1200 °C, resulting in the decrease of the hardness from HRC 63.5 to HRC 61.7. The presented work shows that, potentially, coupled multi-physical-fields activated technology is able to produce hard alloys to meet the engineering applications.