Processing of Porous Stainless Steel by Compaction Method Using Egg Shell as Space Holder

Development of lightweight materials becomes essential and has been applied for various structural and functional applications in industrial field since last decade. Porous metal can contribute to lightweight material with great mechanical, thermal and electrical properties. In this study, porous stainless steel was fabricated by using powder metallurgy technique and egg shell as a new potential space holder material. Stainless steel 316L was used as metal matrix powder, egg shells as space holder material, and polyethylene glycol (PEG) as binder to increase the green density of the preforms. The material was mixed using roller mill before the mixtures are ready to the next process of compaction by using uniaxial pressing machine. The samples were sintered to two-stage sintering at temperature 1000°C in a tube furnace. Physical properties of porous stainless steel were studies by performing density and porosity test. Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) apparatus was used to characterize morphology properties. The results show that, porous stainless steel with the composition of 30 wt. % of egg shells added into formulation yields the highest porosity compared to other compositions and the distribution of pores can be classify as micro-pores.