Powder Consolidation and Forming of Ceramics (Green Body)

If severe variations in packing density occur in the green body, the fired body will, in general,
contain heterogeneities that will limit the engineering properties. The homogeneous packing of
particles in the green body is the desired goal of the consolidation step.

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PACKING OF PARTICLES

Particle packing is commonly divided into two types:

(1)regular (or ordered) packing
(2)random packing.
Important
The commonly used ceramic forming methods produce random packing
arrangements, but regular packing is typically the first structure
encountered in models, partly because of their similarity to crystalline
atomic structure.

Particle Packing
The rhombohedral packing arrangement, which has the highest packing
density, is the most stable packing arrangement.
Such dense packing arrangements have been achieved over only very
small regions (called domains) of the green body
An example is the slow sedimentation of monosize SiO2 particles from a stable
suspension

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PACKING OF MONISIZED PARTICLES

The definition of packing fraction can be given as: "the volume taken by number
of particles in a given space of volume".

Dense random packing

is an empirical parameter used to characterize the maximum volume fraction of

solid objects obtained when they are packed randomly.
Experiments have shown that the most compact way to pack spheres randomly
gives a maximum density of about 64%. This is significantly smaller than the
maximum theoretical filling fraction of 74%
Dense random packing 62-64% of theoretical density
Powders used in the industrial production of ceramics very rarely have spherical
particles. The surfaces of the particles are also rarely smooth. Particles with rough
surface textures or shapes suffer from agglomeration because of increased
interparticle friction, and the packing density decreases as the particle shape
departs from that of a sphere.

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Dense random packing

The highest packing density and most isotropic structures
are obtained with spheres and with particles having simple, equiaxial shapes
(e.g.,cubes). Anisotropic particles can be packed to high packing density if they
are ordered, but in random packing, the packing density can be quite low.

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Bimodal Mixtures of Spheres

The packing density of an arrangement of spheres in dense random packing can
be increased by filling the interstitial holes with spheres that are smaller than
those of the original structure

For this type of random packing of a binary mixture of spheres, the packing
density is a function of
(1)the ratio of the sphere diameters and
(2)the fraction of the large (or small) spheres in the mixture.

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Bimodal Mixtures of Spheres

As the ratio of the diameter of the large sphere to the small sphere
increases, the data move closer to the theoretical curve.
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Continuous Particle Size Distributions

Most powders used for the fabrication of ceramics have a continuous distribution
of particle sizes between some minimum and maximum size.
As long as the particles are very different in size, the packing density increases as the
number of components in the mixture increases.
Extending this concept to continuous distributions, a wide particle size distribution gives a
higher packing density than a narrow particle size distribution.

The packing density increases as

the standard deviation of the
distribution S increases (i.e., as
the spread in the distribution of
sizes increases) and reaches fairly
high values for a wide distribution
of particle sizes

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Continuous Particle Size Distributions

However,
the packing density by itself is a misleading parameter for predicting the densification
behavior and microstructural evolution during sintering.
A more important consideration for advanced ceramics is the packing uniformity or,
equivalently, the spatial scale over which density fluctuations occur in the green body.

A uniform green density is necessary for defect free

ceramic parts after sintering

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