The as-sintered condition offers better elongation, but with lower hardness and strength. An austemper heat treat imparts some spring characteristics to the material, while increasing hardness, wear resistance, and impact strength over that of an as-sintered part. Case hardening offers very good surface hardness and wear resistance with improved impact strength over that of a quench & tempered or austempered part. A quench & temper heat treat is a typical and economical process that offers various strength and wear resistance properties depending upon the final hardness.

Property values reported are typical for Kinetics' MIM products at a hardness of 47 HRC. Higher hardness and strength can be obtained routinely by varying quench and temper conditions.

Metal Injection Molding General Notes: Fine metal powders (generally <25 microns in diameter) are combined with a polymer binder system to form a feedstock suitable for injection molding. Kinetics' feedstock is compounded using specific binder and metal powder formulations to control consistency, quality, and dimensional repeatability of parts produced. While standard plastic injection molding machines and molds are used to produce MIM parts, due to the presence of the polymer binder in MIM feedstocks, mold cavities are designed approximately 20% larger than the final part size. Like plastics, MIM molds may have multiple cavities, inserts, slides, unscrewing cores, and hot runner systems. After molding, green parts are debound and sintered at temperatures up to 2,600°F. During debinding, the polymer binder breaks down and dissipates while the metal particles retain all of the molded features. The metal particles fuse together during sintering and the part shrinks approximately 20% to form a solid metal part.

Information provided by Kinetics, Inc.