The Liquid-Phase Sintering and Coalescence of Small Solid Particles

摘要

The process of the liquid-phase sintering is quantitatively con- sidered from the viewpoint of the thermodynamic approach in ap- plication to isothermal conditions. The model is based on the as- sumption that a metastable liquid phase is formed near the contact of two particles. The most probable way of the sintering process is defined by variation of configuration of the system consisting of two partially molten particles and minimization of the free energy of the system. As a result of calculations based on the model, the following are obtained: i) step-by-step configurations of partially molten particles during the process of sintering, and ii) the inten- sity of the solid-Iiquid transition as a function of the sizes of the particles and their temperature.