Microstructure effects on the thermal properties of vacuum sintered AISI 316L stainless steel

The photothermal technique open photoacoustic cell and the non-Adiabatic thermal relaxation calorimetric are applied to measure thermal properties of the sintered stainless steel AISI 316L as a function of the porosity. The results showed that thermal diffusivity and thermal conductivity values as a function of the applied uniaxial pressure presented a strong correlation with the surface area of contact of the particles, which constitute the porous medium. Besides, the study of the relationship between physical properties, such as mass density, porosity, and permeability and the microstructure shows that the greater the particle interaction the better the thermal properties correlation. (C) 2003 American Institute of Physics.