APPLICATION OF FINITE VOLUME APPROACH TO INVESTIGATE MASS TRANSFER PHENOMENA IN SINTERING BY SURFACE DIFFUSION

Sintering is a thermally driven engineering process used to manufacture solid and porous materials for applications in heat transfer, sound absorption, and electrical systems. This study focuses on the numerical investigation of the mass transport phenomena in the sintering process driven by surface diffusion. A Lagrange interpolation technique is applied for accurate interface approximation, and an efficient finite volume-based numerical scheme is constructed. This numerical scheme is applied to study the mass transfer phenomena during sintering by surface diffusion. This work offers critical insights into the influence of geometrical angles and radii ratios over the mass transfer or sintering neck growth rate. Also, it highlights the applicability of the proposed finite volume method for modeling mass transfer in complex geometry systems. The results demonstrate that, initial geometrical of materials plays a vital role in the mass transfer or sintering neck formation. It is noticed that, asymmetric particle systems with lower radii ratios exhibit greater curvature gradients. This leads to accelerated neck growth compared to symmetric systems. Larger geometrical angles increase neck growth rate by reducing particle distance. This facilitates more efficient mass transfer than a smaller geometrical angle. The proposed numerical scheme efficiently captures the physical phenomena of neck growth by mass transfer in the sintering process.