Metal Injection Molding Introduction
Metal Injection Molding (MIM) is powder metallurgy near-net forming technology derived from the plastic injection molding industry. Plastic injection molding technology has a low price to produce a variety of complex shape products, but plastic molding products are not high strength. We can improve their performance by adding metal or ceramic powders to plastics to obtain products with higher strength and good wear resistance. In recent years, this idea has evolved to maximize solid particles’ content, remove the binder, and densify the forming blank during the subsequent sintering process. This new powder metallurgy method is called metal injection molding (MIM).
METAL INJECTION MOULDING (MIM) ADVANTAGES
Metal Injection Molding (MIM) process offers the following benefits:
- Low-Cost manufacturing of high-volume complex parts
- Less production time we compared with investment casting.
- Net-Near-shape manufacturing with minimum material waste.
- Castings to Excellent Mechanical Properties and Parts reflected particle size and increased sintered density.
- Properties equal to wrought alloys
- Several pre-alloys and master alloys are available.
- Take less time in finishing operations
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Metal Injection Molding (MIM) is a Metal Molding process that molds the metal in powdered form and finely powdered metal is integrated with binder material to make a feedstock. The Feedstock is then hardened and shaped to make the final product.
Metal Injection Molding is an Ideal process for facilitating the production of products with complicated shapes and high-volume products.
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Metal Injection Molding(MIM) is used in a wide variety of automotive, medical, electronic, industrial, and consumer industries for products such as automotive parts, aerospace equipment, cell phones, dental instruments, electronic heat sinks and sealing packages, electronic connector hardware, industrial tools, fiber optic connectors, spray systems, disk drives, medical devices, handheld power tools, surgical instruments, and sports equipment.
Metal Injection Molding Process
The basic process steps of metal injection molding include, firstly, the metal powder and binder are selected to meet the requirements of MIM. The powder and binder are mixed into a homogeneous feed at a specific temperature using appropriate methods; after granulation in custom injection molding, the resulting molding blank is sintered and tempered after grease remover treatment to make the final product.
1: MIM powder and powder making technology
MIM raw material powder requirements are high, and the choice of powder to facilitate mixing, injection molding, degreasing, and sintering, is often contradictory. The study of MIM raw material powder includes powder shape, particle size, particle size composition, specific surface, etc.; table 1 lists the most suitable for MIM with the properties of the raw material powder.
As MIM raw material powder requirements are outstanding, MIM raw material powder prices are generally higher; some even reach 10 times the price of traditional PM powder, which is a crucial factor limiting the widespread use of MIM technology. The core methods to make the powder with raw material are pressure water atomization, High-Pressure Gas Atomization, and Carbonyl.
2: Binder
MIM binder technology is used to enhance the fluidity to suit the injection molding and maintain the shape of the blank. The two most basic functions; in addition, it should also have easy to remove, non-pollution, non-toxic, reasonable cost, and other characteristics. Due to this reason, various binders in recent years are gradually selected from experience alone to the method of degreasing, and the requirements of the binder function targeted the direction of the design of the binder system.
The binder generally comprises low and high molecular components plus some necessary additives. Low molecular component viscosity, good fluidity, easy to remove; high molecular component viscosity, high strength helps to maintain the strength of the forming blank. The appropriate ratio of the two together to obtain high powder loading capacity and finally get high precision and high uniformity of the product.
3: Mixing
Mixing is mixing metal powder with a binder to get uniform feeding material. Since the nature of the feed material determines the performance of the final injection molded parts, the mixing process step is very important. It involves various factors such as the way and sequence of binder and powder addition, mixing temperature, and the characteristics of the mixing device. This process step has remained at the level of experience, and ultimately, an important indicator to evaluate the mixing process is the uniformity and consistency of the resulting feed.
Mixing the MIM feed is done under the combined effect of heat and shear. The mixing temperature cannot be too high; otherwise, the binder may decompose due to the viscosity being too low and the separation of the two phases of powder and binder, as the size of the shear force varies depending on the mixing method. MIM commonly used mixing devices are a double screw extruder, Z-shaped impeller mixer, single screw extruder, plunger extruder, double planetary mixer, and double cam mixer. These mixing devices are suitable for the Preparation of viscosity in the range of 1-1000Pa-s mixer.
The method of mixing is generally to add high melting point components to melt first, then cool down, add low melting point components, and then add the metal powder in batches. It can prevent the vaporization or decomposition of the low melting point group element. Adding metal powder in batches can prevent the torque surge caused by cooling down too quickly and reduce equipment losses.
For the way of adding different particle size powder when matching, the Japanese patent introduces: the course 15-40um water atomized powder is added to the binder first, then the 5-15um powder is added, and finally the powder ≤5um powder is added, so that the final product obtained has little change in shrinkage.
To evenly coat a layer of binder around the powder, add the powder metal directly to the high melting point component, then the low melting point component, and finally, remove it from the air. Such as Anwar PMMA suspension directly into the stainless-steel powder mix, add the PEG aqueous solution, dry, and then remove the air while stirring. O’Connor uses solvent mixing. First, SA and dry powder mix, then add tetrahydrofuran solvent, and then add the polymer, tetrahydrofuran in the heat to escape, and then add the powder mix, you can get a uniform feeding.
4: Injection Molding
The purpose of injection molding is to obtain the desired shape of a defect-free, uniform particle row by the MIM forming blanks. First, the granular feed is heated to a certain high temperature to make it flowable. Then it is injected into the mold cavity and cooled down to get the desired shape of a certain rigidity of the blank, and then it is removed from the mold to get the MIM molding blank. This process is the same as the traditional plastic injection molding process. But due to the high powder content of the MIM feed, making its injection molding process in the process parameters and some other aspects are very different, improper control is prone to a variety of defects.
5: Degreasing
Since the emergence of MIM technology, with the different binder systems, the formation of various MIM process paths and degreasing methods are also varied. Degreasing time has been shortened from a few days in the beginning to a few hours. All degreasing methods can be roughly divided into two categories in terms of degreasing steps: one is the two-step degreasing method.
The two-step method includes solvent degreasing + thermal degreasing, siphon degreasing – thermal degreasing, etc. The one-step method is mainly a one-step thermal degreasing method, and the most advanced one is a meta mold. The following are a few representative MIM degreasing methods, respectively.
6: Sintering
Sintering is the last step in the MIM process; sintering eliminates the porosity between the powder particles. MIM products to achieve full dense or nearly full dense. Due to the large amount of binder used in metal injection molding technology, the shrinkage during sintering is very large, and the linear shrinkage generally reaches 13%-25%, so there is a problem with deformation control and dimensional accuracy control. Especially because most of the MIM products are complex shaped parts, this problem becomes more and more prominent, and uniform feeding is a key factor for the dimensional accuracy and deformation control of the final sintered products.
High powder shaking density can reduce sintering shrinkage and facilitate the sintering process and dimensional accuracy control. For iron-based and stainless steel products, there is also a problem of potential carbon control in sintering. Due to the high price of a fine powder, studying enhanced sintering technology for coarse powder blanks is an important way to reduce the production cost of powder injection molding. This technology is an important research aspect of metal powder injection molding.
Due to the complex shape of MIM products and large sintering shrinkage, most of the products still need post-sintering treatment after sintering, including shaping, heat treatment (carburizing, nitriding, carbonitriding, etc.), surface treatment (fine grinding, ion nitriding, electroplating, shot hardening, etc.), etc.
Precision
The reference design of MIM net molding accuracy is usually ± 0.5% of the size. Certain characteristics of net molding can reach ± 0.3%. As with other technologies, the higher the accuracy requirement, the higher the cost, so moderate relaxation of tolerance requirements is encouraged where quality allows. Tolerances that cannot achieve with MIM primary molding can be achieved with surface preparation.
Thinning
Wall thicknesses of less than 6 mm are optimal for MIM. Thicker outer walls are also possible, but costs will increase due to longer processing times and the addition of additional material. Also, very thin walls below 0.5 mm are achievable for MIM but have high design requirements.
Capacity
MIM is a highly flexible process and can be achieved very economically with an annual demand of several thousand to several million. As with cast and injection molded parts, MIM requires customer investment in tooling and tooling costs, so for small quantities, this usually affects cost estimates.
