DC Plasma Technology Applied to Powder Metallurgy: an Overview

DC plasma is a very promising technology for processing di®erent materials, and is becoming especially interesting when low environmental impact and high-performance treatments are needed. Some of the intrinsic characteristics of DC plasma technology, which make it suitable for powder metallurgy (PM) and powder injection molding (PIM) parts production, are low- pressure processing and plasma environment high reactivity. Moreover it can be considered as a highly competitive green technology. In this work, an overview of some of the important DC plasma techniques applied to PM and PIM parts processing is presented. Emphasis is given to the descriptions of the main characteristics and the technique potentials of plasma-assisted nitriding, plasma-assisted thermal debinding, plasma-assisted sintering, and simultaneously plasma-assisted sintering and surface alloying. The aspects presented and discussed in this paper indicate that DC plasma processes are promising and competitive techniques for PM and PIM parts processing.