Numerical simulation study demonstrates tooling-dependent thermal distribution control in conductive and insulating samples, indicating improved scalability for spark plasma sintering.
Spark plasma sintering (SPS) is a technique that uses resistive heating to enable rapid sintering. The ongoing industrialization of SPS is tied to the scaling of sintered parts. However, upscaling can lead to an inhomogeneous temperature distribution during sintering and to non‐uniform properties in the sintered components. A solution lies in optimizing the SPS tooling design. The paper addresses this issue with a new digital twin, Leonardo 2.0, that numerically replicates the SPS setup. The digital twin is paired with an external database that contains properties of sintered and tooling materials. A control file governs the digital twin's operations in a specific case study. This editable ASCII file specifies the tooling geometry, materials, sintering cycle, boundary conditions, and output options. The paper demonstrates the application of the digital twin to analyze the impact of tooling components on the temperature distribution in electrically conductive (tungsten) and insulating (3YSZ zirconia) samples. The digital twin has great potential for applications in SPS tooling design across research and industry.
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Laptev et al. (2026) studied this question.
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