DC plasma is a very promising technology for processing different materials, and is becoming especially interesting when low environmental impact and high-performance treatments are needed. Some of the intrinsic characteristics of DC plasma technology, which make it suitable for powder metallurgy (PM) and powder injection molding (PIM) parts production, are lowpressure processing and plasma environment high reactivity. Moreover it can be considered as a highly competitive green technology. In this work, an overview of some of the important DC plasma techniques applied to PM and PIM parts processing is presented. Emphasis is given to the descriptions of the main characteristics and the technique potentials of plasma-assisted nitriding, plasma-assisted thermal debinding, plasma-assisted sintering, and simultaneously plasma-assisted sintering and surface alloying. The aspects presented and discussed in this paper indicate that DC plasma processes are promising and competitive techniques for PM and PIM parts processing.
This paper presents an experimental study on three different capillary structure technologies of heat pipes for application in the thermal management of electronic packaging. The first capillary structure is that of axial grooves manufactured by wire electrical discharge machining (wire-EDM). The sintering process with copper powder produced the second heat pipe. Finally, a hybrid heat pipe was made by the combination of the two previous methods. The heat pipes were produced using copper tubes with an outer diameter of 9.45 mm and a length of 200 mm, and were tested horizontally at increasing heat loads varying from 5 to 35 W. The working fluid used was distilled water. The experimental results showed that all capillary structures for heat pipes worked successfully, so the studied manufacturing methods are suitable. Nonetheless, the hybrid heat pipe is the best, due to the lowest thermal resistance presented.
In powder metallurgy, it is necessary to know the powder's nature to understand how the processing of a powder occurs. In this paper, a characterization of a copper powder for heat pipe wick applications was experimentally done. The copper powder manufacturing method was atomization. This metallic powder was characterized by Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM), X-Ray Fluorescence Spectrometry (ED-XRF), and Laser Diffraction Granulometry. As a result, the purity and the shape are compatible with the powder manufacturing method and great for wicks. Also, the copper powder has a unimodal distribution that is excellent for capillary structures.
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