Study on Powder Injection Molding of TiC/316L Composites

TiC/316L composites were prepared by powder injection molding. Using artificial neural networks to predict injection parameters and ideal degreasing and sintering processes was designed. The best injection parameters were as follows:injection temperature of 156 ℃, injection pressure of 70 MPa, injection time of 2 s, holding pressure 37 MPa, holding time of 4 s, and mold temperature of 37 ℃. Trichloroethylene was chosen as the degreasing solvent. The optimum degreasing temperature was 55℃ and the degreasing time was 8 hours. The mechanical properties of sintered specimensat 1375 ℃, are best when sintered in vacuum for 45 min. The specimen with hardness of 288 HV, tensile strength of 508 MPa and friction coefficient of 0.530 is obtained.