on the study of mechanical properties of aluminum/nano-alumina composites produced via powder injection molding

Powder injection molding (pim) is a precision manufacturing process used for production of advanced composites. mixing of polymeric binder with metal powders, molding of feedstock, de-binding of brown parts and sintering of green samples are four main steps of this process. in the present study, the compounds containing multi-component binder system and aluminum/ nano-alumina (0-9 wt.%) powders were prepared and used as feedstock. after that, the feed-stocks were injected, de-bound and sintered for producing standard specimens. finally, the sintered composites were produced with a maximum relative density of 97.7%. afterward, the hardness, yield and ultimate tensile strength of the nano-composites were evaluated. the results showed that the relative density, hardness and strength of the manufactured composites increased due to the addition of nano-reinforcements. it is demonstrated that the effect of alumi-na on the density of pim composites differs from that of conventional powder metallurgy. scan-ning electron microscope (sem) reveals that the agglomeration takes place in the sample contain-ing 9 wt.% nano-alumina.