Sintering is a process by which object is formed from a metal powder by heating the powder at a temperature below its melting point. The powder after being compacted and into desired shape and heated is sintered for few hours for joining the powder into a single solid object. The sintering furnace is mainly designed to accomplish this task in a convenient way.

Features

• Sintering furnaces consist of muffle to help direct, control and reduce atmosphere flow. Many sintering furnaces consist of silicon carbide muffle.
  
  
• The sintering furnace can either be heated with gas or electricity.
  
  
• Cooling system used are of two types that is atmosphere cooling and conventional water-jacketed cooling. Some of the furnaces combined both the cooling system into single unit.
  
  
• To alter furnace dew points and to ensure proper sintering conditions sintering furnace offers an optional moisturizing system
  
  
• Some sintering furnace also uses high temperature ceramic belt furnace technology which helps in the yielding of superior load bearing capacity, high throughputs, and better net-to-gross heating ratio.
  
  
• Monitoring of temperature atmosphere flow, dew point, oxygen content, carbon control, belt speed etc. is monitored and controlled automatically.

Constituents of Sintering Chamber
Following are the constituents of sintering chamber:

Furnace Chambers
There are different types of chambers in the sintering furnace like Load/Unload Chamber, hot Zone Chamber, rapid Cooling Chamber, controlled Oxidation Chamber and work Transfer Chamber. The chamber can be opened at any time for easy loading. The hot Zone Chamber is the important part of the furnace which is made up of Tungsten, Tantalum, Graphite, Molybdenum or high temperature ceramics. Heating elements and shields can be designed with different sheath thicknesses and rigidized, temperature stabilized materials to maximize life expectancy. The cooling chamber through heat exchanger cools the materials within a short span of time. The work transfer chamber contains the mechanism for raising, lowering and moving the work stacks in transit from station to station. This chamber ensures an inert work transfer conditions and oxidation free environment for maximum hot zone life.

Power Supply and Control System
Power is supplied by high powered generator where is monitoring is done effectively through field devices, computers and programmable logic controller.

High Vacuum System
High vacuum system is designed to handle the high load of the gas. the system consist of diffusion pump, electro-pneumatic vacuum gate, valves with limit switches, cold trap with refrigeration condensing unit, mechanical pump or dry pump with blower etc.

Cooling System
The furnace components are cooled through the cooling system. The water circuit is equipped with a flow switch and shut-off valve. Each water circuit drains into an open drain bosh which consist of an optical eye to detect water flow. The heat exchanger is provided for rapid cooling.

Applications
The applications of sintering furnace are as follows:

• Sintering of metal alloys
• Sintering of steels
• Sintering of metallic powders
• Annealing
• Brazing