Master Sintering Curve - A Practical Approach to its Construction

The concept of a Master Sintering Curve (MSC) is a strong tool for optimizing the sintering process. However, constructing the MSC from sintering data involves complicated and time- consuming calculations. A practical method for the construction of a MSC is presented in the paper. With the help of a few dilatometric sintering experiments the newly developed software calculates the MSC and finds the optimal activation energy of a given material. The software, which also enables sintering prediction, was verified by sintering tetragonal and cubic zirconia, and alumina of two different particle sizes.