KONA Powder and Particle Journal (Mar 2014)
Smart Powder Processing for Advanced Materials
Abstract
Smart powder processing stands for novel powder processing techniques that create advanced materials with minimal energy consumption and environmental impacts. Particle bonding technology is a typical smart powder processing technique to make advanced composites. The technology has two main unique features. Firstly, it creates direct bonding between particles without any heat support or binders of any kind in the dry phase. The bonding is achieved through the enhanced particle surface activation induced by mechanical energy, in addition to the intrinsic high surface reactivity of nanoparticles. Using this feature, desired composite particles can be successfully fabricated. The second feature of this technology is its ability to control the nano/micro structure of the assembled composite particles. As a result, it can custom various kinds of nano/micro structures and can produce new materials with a simpler manufacturing process in comparison to wet chemical techniques. In this paper, its application examples for making advanced materials will be explained.These two features lead to the achievement of minimizing energy consumption and environmental impacts when producing advanced materials. By making use of the particle bonding principle, a new one-pot processing method to synthesize nanoparticles without applying extra heat was developed. Furthermore, by carefully controlling the bonding between different kinds of materials in the composite particles, effective separation of elemental components can be achieved. It leads to the development of a novel technique for recycling advanced composite materials and turns them to high-functional applications. In this paper, these approaches will also be introduced. It is our goal to signify the particle bonding technology as a potential advanced processing technique for producing powder materials.
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