Densification of Composite Powder Mixtures Under Hydrostatic Pressure

Many important powder processing operations involve the densification of powder mixtures consisting of particles with different deformation resistance. In this paper we present a modeling framework for the densification of such compacts, based on the deformation of particle-to-particle contacts and takes into account the deformation of both hard and soft particles. Comparison with experiments is good at relatively low relative strengths of the hard phase but only fair when the hard phase has a high yield strength. Discrete element models are employed to evaluate the relative value of interparticle forces on hard-hard and soft-hard contacts with respect to the corresponding forces on soft-soft contacts. Results from the discrete element model explain the performance of the model and provide guidelines for its fine tuning.