Metal Injection Moulding (MIM)
MIM generally uses sizes smaller than 22µm which means that the specific surface of the powder, expressed in m2 g-1, is high.
Consequently MIM powders are highly surface reactive and tend to attract oxygen and moisture unless carefully handled.
MPP’s vacuum melting capability ensures the lowest oxygen and nitrogen levels during powder manufacture and subsequent handling under inert gas ensures the powder arrives at the next stage of the process in the purest possible condition.
Within a given size range particle size distribution must be reproducible from batch to batch to ensure that sintering response and shrinkage is likewise uniform. This is particularly important in MIM as the tooling required to form the green parts is expensive and variations in shrinkage during sintering would lead to irreconcilable departures from allowed size tolerances in the finished part.
MPP’s atomisation technology allows very reproducible size distribution in the as-atomised powder which leads to similar reproducibility of size distributions between the lower and upper size limits specified by the parts producer.
