Technical Papers and Notes - Extractive Metallurgy Division - The Rate of Infiltration of Metals

NFILTRATION is a term used to designate that i- process by which the pores of a metal powder are filled with a relatively low-melting liquid metal through the action of capillary forces. This is accomplished in practice either by heating the porous body in contact with the solid infiltrant metal above the melting point of the latter, or by preheating the porous body separately and then dipping it into the liquid metal. The liquid, as it sweeps through the porous body, replaces the gases progressively, thus yielding a relatively dense product in a short time.' Liquid-phase sintering, which is related to infiltration, is a process by which a mixture of two or more metal powders is sintered at a temperature between the liquidus and solidus of the ultimate alloy.' According to Cannon" liquid-phase sintering can be divided into three stages which he calls liquid flow, accommodation, and solid sintering. The largest density increase occurs during the first stage, where the lower melting component melts and, driven by capillary forces, flows among the particles of the higher melting component, where, after dissolution of the bonds between the solid particles, it moves them into close packing. This happens so quickly that little has yet been learned of its mechanism. A study of the rate of capillary rise of a liquid metal in a higher melting metal-powder compact may be expected, therefore, to contribute not only to a firmer understanding of the process of infiltration as such but also to a more extensive knowledge of what occurs during the initial stage of liquid-phase sintering. Theoretical Basis In order to derive a mathematical expression of the rate of infiltration, it has been assumed that a powder compact consists of a great many parallel capillary tubes and that the rate of rise of a liquid in an average capillary channel represents the rise in the entire compact. For a straight capillary, assuming that Poiseuille's law obtains for the non-stationary state and that wetting is very rapid, Ligenza and Bernstein' have derived the following differential eauation of motion where h is the height of rise of the column of liquid at time t, R, is the radius and 1 the length of the capillary, t) and 7, the viscosities of liquid and air, respectively, p and p, the density of the liquid and air, respectively, y the liquid-gas surface tension, 0 the liquid-solid contact angle, and g the acceleration due to gravity. The term on the left of Equation [I] represents the rate of change of momentum of the contents of the capillary tube. On the right the terms represent, respectively, the forces due to a) surface tension, b) viscous resistance, c) gravity, and d) end-drag effect. Equation [I] is not amenable to explicit solution, but for a tube of sufficiently small radius, the rate of rise may be slow enough so that the rate of change of momentum and end-drag terms may be neglected. The validity of this simplification was established by Ligenza and Bernstein' by graphical differentiation of observed data obtained from organic liquids rising in glass tubes. The solution of this simplified case is: