A mesoscale description of microstructure evolution for the sintering of ceramics

A new mesoscale description of sintering microstructures has been developed based on pore boundary tessellation. Evolution in the populations of tessellation cell properties suggests that intermediate stage sintering is characterized by the removal of relatively large pore sections thought to be associated with a low density network. The reduction in the area fraction associated with these larger pore sections was found to correlate with the change in densification rate during sintering, leading to speculation on the cause of the commonly observed logarithmic relationship between solid volume fraction and time. Sintering above a solid volume fraction of 0.9 appeared to be dominated by pore shrinkage and elimination consistent with the common perception of final stage sintering. (c) 2005 Acta Materialia Inc. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.