Abstract:A new mechanical model for warm powder compaction was presented. Warm compaction process of iron-based powder was investigated to deal with the existence of elastic, plastic and thermal strains. A coupled mechanical and thermal model was developed based on ellipsoidal yield criterion and continuum theory. The constitutive equations were integrated into the constitutive integral arithmetic and solved employing incremental iterative solution strategy. The flow stress model of iron powder was nonlinearly fitted according to uniaxial warm compaction. The constitutive model was implemented into user-subroutines of MSC.Marc. With the equations, algorithms and programs developed, the compaction procedures of a complex synchronous pulley were simulated. Two different compaction schemes with different punch displacements were tested and the relative density distribution was obtained. Comparison with experimental data shows that the homogeneity of green compact is greatly affected by the compaction mode. The simulation results agree with the experiments very well.

Key words: metal powder; finite element method; warm compaction; relative density