A differentiating approach to the master sintering curve analysis

Abstract The master sintering curve (MSC) has been widely applied in analyzing and predicting the densification process during sintering. The usual approach to the MSC analysis supposes that the apparent activation energy of sintering Q keeps constant during the whole sintering process, but some studies reported that the density influenced Q. This paper proposed a differentiating approach to the MSC analysis, in which Q was taken as a function of the density or the linear shrinkage of the compact. The MSC of a SiO2-CaO co-doped alumina ceramic during sintering was built by the differentiating approach and the usual approach. It was found that the differentiating approach was more accurate in predicting the densification process than the usual approach, and it was less time-consuming in the numerical computation than the usual approach. The evolution of Q with the density calculated by the differentiating approach can be used to analyze the effect of the density on the densification rate during sintering.