Sintering thermodynamics of fields activated microforming and sintering technology for fabricated MnZn ferrite microparts

MnZn ferrites are widely used as core materials in electronic applications. However, few studies on fabricated MnZn ferrites microcomponents are available in this paper. To address this issue, a novel fields-activated microforming and sintering technology (micro-FAST) was introduced for the fabrication of MnZn ferrites microparts. The experimental results show that micro-FAST is an efficient process, which has lower energy consumption and little impact on the environment as a result of directly forming the component from loose powders. More interestingly, MnZn ferrite powders with a composition of Zn0.8Mn0.2Fe2O4(wt.%) can be sintered at low temperature without much compromise of the final quality of microparts formed by micro-FAST. To analyze the sintering mechanism, in this paper, the sintering thermodynamics of micro-FAST for the fabrication of Φ 1.0 mm × 1.0 mm sized cylindrical bulk ferrite has been studied. The results show that the sintering energy of micro-FAST for MnZn ferrite powder comes from three sources: 1) heat exchange with die and punches; 2) alternating electric field; and 3) alternating magnetic field. These results being in correspondence with the analytical results of computer simulation.