Press and Sinter

The Press and Sinter module will go into both fundamental and practical facets of the conventional powder processing route comprising pressing and sintering operations.

The two first days, one-hour lectures with be given by academic and industrial experts, starting with pressing and continuing with sintering. In both cases, the courses will include fundamental, technological and modellings issues. A more general lecture on material selection methods will end up the first day. Several lectures of the second day will focus on sintered steels, as a major application of press and sinter process.

The third day will be fully devoted to lab work by using the facilities of SIMAP laboratory of Grenoble INP. The students will handle die pressing and free sintering devices, analyze powder compressibilty and sintering shrinkage curves so as to identify densification mechanisms and observe the microstructure of sintered materials by electron microscopy. They will also be initiated to the numerical simulation of processes by the finite element and discrete element methods.

In the morning of the fourth day, student teams will be formed and each team will be asked to design a PM material and process allowing for the fabrication of a specific component. The work will be by supervised by SIMAP staff. During the afternoon the students will visit a plant of Sintertech company, in the Grenoble area, where steel parts are fabricated, mainly for the automotive industry.

Finally, in the morning of the fifth day, two lectures will deal with specific applications of press and sinter processing and one on the common matter of entrepreneurship and innovation. Afterwards, each team will present the outcome of its project. Finally, a short exam will control the knowledge and expertise gained by the students during the full week.

For more information on Press and Sinter, EPMA has a short introduction here.

Programme (draft):

The programme may be subject to change