MICROWAVE HEATING OF PURE COPPER POWDER

WITH VARYING PARTICLE SIZE AND POROSITY

Avijit Mondal1*, Dinesh Agrawal2 and Anish Upadhyaya1

Department of Materials & Metallurgical Engineering
1

Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur 208016, India

2
The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA
*
avijitm@iitk.ac.in

In recent years, microwave processing of metal/alloy powders have gained considerable

potential in the field of material synthesis. Microwave heating is recognized for its various advan-
tages such as: time and energy saving, rapid heating rates, considerably reduced processing cycle
time and temperature, fine microstructures and improved mechanical properties, better product
performance, etc. Microwave material interaction for materials having bound charge are well es-
tablished, but for highly conductive materials like metals, there is not much information available to
interpret the mechanism of microwave heating and subsequent sintering of metallic materials. The
present study describes how the thermal profile of electrically conductive powder metal like copper
changes with particle size and also with porosity content; in other words, initial green density when
the material is exposed to 2.45 GHz microwave radiation in a multimode microwave furnace.

Submission Date: 5 August 2008

Acceptance Date: 29 December 2008
Publication Date: 16 January 2009

INTRODUCTION graded materials, metals and alloys [Rodiger et

Microwave processing technology has been
developed in the field of ceramics and compos-
ites. Microwave heating allows an instantaneous
volumetric, and therefore a more rapid, heating
in comparison with the conventional heating
process. It also provides enhanced sintering
kinetics. As a result, it allows a reduction of
process temperature and time which leads to
an increased productivity and a reduction of
energy consumption. During the last decade, the
microwave has been used for sintering particu-
late metals. The reported materials of interest
included hard metals, metal–ceramic functional
Keywords: Cu metal powder, microwave sintering,
particle size, porosity
Guest Editor: Dr. Satoshi Horikoshi, Tokyo University of
Science, Chiba, Japan
al., 1998; Porada and Borchert, 1996-97; Jain
et al., 2006; Sethi et al., 2003; Anklekar et al.,
2001].
Microwave sintering of metal powders
which have high electrical conductivity is a
new area with growing interest. It was first
reported in 1999 by Roy and coworkers [1999]
that a porous, powder metal compact could be
heated and sintered in a microwave field. At that
time, this was considered surprising because the
electrically conducting materials were supposed
to reflect microwave radiation. Later, other
researchers also demonstrated that all powder
metals at room temperature absorb microwaves
and only bulk metals reflect the microwaves,
allowing only surface penetration.
However, these empirical studies did not
attempt to explain the observed heating trends
and presently there are few reports regarding

International Microwave Power Institute 43-1-5

the details of the direct interaction of micro-
waves with powder metal compacts. Sintering
mechanisms and activation energy for diffusion
were studied by Saitou [2006] and he concluded
that microwave radiation does not change the
sintering mechanism for diffusion in the case
of metallic material sintering. Thus, there is not
much information available by which to inter-
pret the mechanism of microwave heating and
subsequent sintering of metallic materials.
Microwave heating of ceramic and other
dielectrically lossy materials have been widely
investigated and the mechanism of micro-
wave-material interaction is well documented.
Microwave penetrates and propagates through
dielectric material, such as SiC. This generates
an internal electric field (E) within a specific
volume, which in turn induces polarization and
movement of charges. The resistance to these
induced motions due to internal, electric and
frictional forces attenuates the electric field.
These losses result in volumetric heating.
The microwave-metal interaction is quite
different than that of ceramics. Being good
electrical conductors, no internal electrical field
is induced in metals. Microwave interaction
with metals is restricted to its surface only. The
depth of penetration in metals, also known as
skin depth, is defined as the distance into the
material at which the incident power drops to
1/e (36.8 %) of the surface value. In general,
the skin depth is relatively small in metals, since
in the microwave regime, the particle sizes are
much smaller than the wavelength of microwave
radiation; the field across the particle is uniform
and causes volumetric heating [Takayama et al.,
2006]. However, for relatively coarse particle
(>100μm), the heating may be conductive from
outside to the interior of the powder. According
to the Faraday’s effect in a conductive material,
a varying magnetic field generates an electric
field that gives rise to eddy currents and sub-
sequent resistive losses. Hence a metal powder
compact will start absorbing more microwave
radiation with an increase in temperature due to
43-1-6 Journal of Microwave Power & Electromagnetic Energy ONLINE
an increase in skin depth.
Many researchers have addressed the role of
several parameters such as sample conductivity
and frequency [Ma et al., 2007], and effect of E
and H field [Rybakov et al., 2006] upon thermal
profile which affect the microwave absorption
by pure powdered metals. In the literature, the
researchers have also addressed the role of par-
ticle size and initial porosity upon the thermal
profile during microwave heating of different
conductive metal powders [Rybakov et al., 2006;
Mishra et al., 2006; Vaidhyanathan and Rao,
1997].
This paper reports how the thermal profile
of electrically conductive metal like copper
changes with particle size and also with poros-
ity content (i.e., initial green density) when the
material is exposed to 2.45 GHz microwave
radiation in a multimode microwave furnace.
EXPERIMENTAL PROCEDURE
For the present study gas-atomized copper
powders of different particle sizes were sup-
plied by American Chemet Corporation, USA.
The average (d50) particle sizes were 6, 12, 18,
63 and 383 μm respectively. The experimental
part consists of two subsets. The first experiment
investigates the effect of particle size during
the heating of powder particle in a multimode
microwave furnace. The second experiment
evaluates the role of initial density during the
heating of metal powder in a multimode micro-
wave furnace. In the first experiment powders
were uniaxially compacted at 400 MPa in to
a cylindrical pellet (12.7 mm diameter and 5
mm average height) of green densities ranging
between 60 to 83% of the theoretical density
(8.9 g/cm3). For the second part of the experi-
ment, cylindrical pellets of the same dimensions
of as-received gas-atomized copper powders
(particle size 18 μm) were compacted using the
same compaction press at 90 to 350 MPa in to
a green densities ranging between 56 to 76%
of the theoretical density. Microwave sintering
Vol. 43, No. 1, 2009
 Figure 2. Thermal profiles of copper compacts as a function of particle size.

temperature. However, as very little variation in
the emissivity was reported in the temperature
range used in the present study, hence, the ef-
fect of variation in emissivity was ignored in the
present investigation.
RESULT AND DISCUSSION
Figure 2 compares the thermal profiles of the
copper powder compacts of varying particle size,
sintered in multimode microwave furnace. It is
interesting to note that the porous metal compact
couple with microwaves heats rapidly. As par-
ticle size increases the heating rate decreases and
after certain time heating rate becomes constant
at a particular power setting. It is well known that
microwaves for electrically conducting materials
such as copper do not penetrate a bulk sample
beyond the skin depth. The skin depth is given
by the well-known expression:
 Another factor that influences the heat-



 
Here, μ is the real part of the permeability taken
to be 4 × 10-7 Tm/A for nonmagnetic materials.
In the above expression, σ and ω are the DC
electrical conductivity and angular frequency,
respectively. At 2.45 GHz, the skin depth of bulk
copper is about 1.3μm. But, as in case of porous
material, electrical conductivity decreases with
an increase in porosity. Therefore, based on the
above equation, effective skin depth should also
increase. So the difference in the heating rates
can be attributed to the difference in skin depth
and also the change in surface area per unit vol-
ume with the change of particle size. The effect
is more pronounced for the larger size powders
because they do not retain their single-particle
status when pressed into a compact and are
more likely to form electrical contacts during
die pressing, making them effectively much
larger. This was experimentally proved by Ma
et al. [2007]. They measured the conductivity of
a green sample made from 22 μm powder and
found that it was 104 times as great as one made
from 3 μm powder.
ing behavior is the initial green density of the
metal powder compacts. Figure 3 shows the
experimental temperature rise with time in pure
copper compacts with 56%, 65%, 71% and 76%

43-1-8 Journal of Microwave Power & Electromagnetic Energy ONLINE Vol. 43, No. 1, 2009
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