The Impact of Sintering Process Parameters on Density of Parts Produced by Metal Injection Moulding (MIM)

The identification of significant process parameters during sintering of brown parts in Metal Injection Moulding (MIM) is essential because improper control of these parameters can result poor parts. The controlled parameters used for optimization in this work include sintering temperature, heating rate, sintering time, cooling rate and sintering atmosphere. These parameters had been optimized using analysis of variance (ANOVA) for signal to noise ratios obtained in experiment performed by following Taguchi L16 orthogonal array. The ANOVA was used to obtain the contribution of significant process parameters for final density of parts. Results showed that four out of the five factors were the significant factors. The sintering temperature had a contribution of 14.37% at a confidence level of 95%, heating rate had a contribution of 14.65% at a confidence level of 95%, sintering time had a contribution of 59.58% at a confidence level of 99%, cooling rate had a contribution of 10.70% with a confidence level of 95%, and sintering atmosphere was observed to be insignificant factor for final density attained by the specimen