Simulation of Percolation Structure of Grain Bonding in Liquid-Phase Sintering by Three-Dimensional Grain Structure Reconstruction

摘要

Computer simulations of the percolation structure often employ ordered lattice networks and assume all sites are monished. However, in many situations, sites are located randomly in the space and have a continuous size distribution. In this article, we use a spatial microstructure reconstruction program to simulate the percolation structure of a classic liquid-phase sintering system, e.g., tungsten heavy alloy. The material was sintered under microgravity conditions to avoid settling. With this technique the continuous three-dimensional (3-D) grain size distribution is created using the features obtained from a two-dimensional (2-D) metallographic section where grain and contacting neighbors are recorded. A recursive procedure is conducted to search for connected grain clusters. After all the grain clusters are taken into account, the dimension and the grain number of the largest cluster are recorded. These simulation results give improved understanding of percolation in liquid-phase sintering.