Sintering behaviors of porous 316L stainless steel fiber felt

Isothermal sintering experiments were performed on the 316 L stainless steel fiber felts with fiber diameters of 8 μm and20 μm. Surface morphologies of the sintered specimens were investigated by using scanning electron microscopy（SEM） and optical microscopy. The results show that the amount of the sintering necks and the relative densities of the fiber felt increase with the increasing of both the sintering temperature and the sintering time. And the activation energies estimated present a decline at high relative densities for both 8 μm and 20 μm fiber felts. Moreover, the sintering densification of the fiber felts is dominated by volume diffusion mechanism at low temperature and relative densities. As more grain boundaries are formed at higher temperature and relative density, grain boundary diffusion will also contribute to the densification of the specimen.