Sintering is a diffusional process and the mechanism of mass transport is assumed to control the phenomenon. Minor attention has been paid on the influence of surface and interface energies during sintering. Even if some works have tried to understand the influence of the modifications of the pore and grain boundary surfaces in the densification during sintering and their relationships with the difusional process, modest progresses have been reached. This work was developed from a simple model of packing spheres, allowing for calculating simultaneously the variation of pore, grain boundary and density for three situations: densification without grain growth, grain growth without densification and grain growth with densification. The results suggest a relationship between the microestrutural evolution during sintering with or without densification and the ratio of the surface energies of the grain boundary and the pores.
sintering; surface energy; grain boundary; sintering model
