Stainless steel–titania composite micro gear fabricated by soft moulding and dispersing technique

✍ Scribed by M.F. Imbaby; K. Jiang

• Book ID: 104052474
• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 2010
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 431 KB
• Volume: 87
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0167-9317
• DOI: 10.1016/j.mee.2009.10.017

✦ Synopsis

The fabrication process of 3D stainless steel-titania composite micro spur gear is presented in detail. The gear has 2.5 mm pitch diameter, 27 teeth and two holes inside each of which is 500 lm in diameter. The composite slurries are prepared from 316-L stainless steel (5 lm), titania (240 nm), dispersant, binder and distilled water. The process starts by producing SU-8 master moulds and their negative soft mould, preparation of composite slurries which contain different compositions: 2.5, 5, 7.5 and 10 wt% of titania, filling the soft mould, obtaining the green parts, de-binding and sintering in both forming gas and vacuum atmospheres at 1350 °C. The optimization of the composite slurries is investigated in detail and the effect of different sintering conditions and the composite compositions on the sintered density, linear shrinkage and hardness is investigated in detail. The resultant sintered density and linear shrinkage show nearly the same for both forming gas and vacuum, on the other hand using forming gas produce significant increase on the micro hardness than using vacuum.