Spark Plasma Sintering (SPS)

The Spark Plasma Sintering (SPS) facility was established in 2008 at Department of Materials and Metallurgical Engineering with financial contribution from Engineering with financial contribution from Department of Science and Technology and CARE grants of IIT Kanpur. It enables superfast consolidation to make dense ceramics, metals and powder metallurgical materials and is the second one in our country. The facility (Figure 1) is currently installed in the Laboratory for Biomaterials. This facility is used by a number of research groups from various academic institutions/R&D laboratories, including IIT Kharagpur, Naval Materials Research Laboratory, and Vikram Sarabhai Space Center.

Unique features:

SPS is one of the variants of the Field Activated Sintering Technique (FAST). FAST involves the imposition of an electrical field during sintering. A large current (up to 6 kA) is made to flow through a porous powder compact, contained in a graphite die-punch assembly (see Figure 2). This enables to attain high heating rate of up to o600C/min, depending on die size. Typically, holding time of 5-10 minutes at sintering temperature is sufficient to densify the materials in the SPS process and the total processing time is less than one hour.

Location:

Laboratory for Biomaterials, Department of Materials & Metallurgical Engineering,
IIT Kanpur

Contact:

Prof. Bikramjit Basu

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