Designs and Evaluations of a Gas Atomizer to Fabricate Stainless Steel Metal Powder to Be Applied at a Metal Injection Molding

Abstract

Metal Injection Molding (MIM) is an application of Powder Metallurgy (PM) and Plastic Injection Molding currently being developed to produce precisely-small components. Most of the metal applications using PM are stainless steel fabricated by a gas atomizer. In this study, an atomizer is designed and fabricated to produce stainless steel powder by using a free fall gas atomization method. The stainless steel used in this study is AISI 304 atomized with the diameter sizes varying from about 3 mm, 5 mm, and 7 mm. The variables of diameter size results are the lowest melt flow rate produces the smallest mean diameter, but no significant difference on the sphericity of powder morphology. While the gas pressure variation results shows that metal powder with smaller size will be produced more using the high gas pressure. The gas atomizer have successfully produced metal powder with the size <40 μm and have a spherical shape. The well rounded sphericity for melt flowrate 0.41x10-3 m3/min, 1.14 x10-3 m3/min, and 2.24x10-3 m3/min are 60.0%, 36.0%, and 55.2% respectively.