Moulded Profile Rod Material

The production process is complex and rigorous. Specifically, first, through powder production and formulation according to the application requirements, after wet grinding, mixing, crushing, drying, sieving, then add the molding agent, and after drying and sieving, the mixture is obtained and granulated.

Then, pressing and forming are carried out. The forming methods of hard alloys are diverse, and in production, cold pressing (bidirectional or multi-directional pressing), hot pressing, and isostatic pressing are often used. Among them, extrusion forming is particularly suitable for the production of longer, uniform complex-shaped products, mainly for hard alloy rods, and the extrusion pressure depends on the performance of the plasticizing powder. Poor extrusion often causes cracks, density differences, etc.

The pressed and formed green bodies enter the low-pressure sintering stage. The sintering of hard alloys is liquid-phase sintering, which is carried out under the condition that the bonding phase is in a liquid state. The pressed green bodies are heated to about 1600°C in a vacuum sintering furnace for sintering, and this process includes complex physical and chemical processes such as plasticizer removal, degassing, solid-phase sintering, liquid-phase sintering, alloying, densification, and solute release. After sintering, the blanks are obtained, and then undergo external cylindrical grinding (the blank does not have this process), size inspection, packaging, and storage. In high-end application fields, the process is constantly innovated.
For example, for hard alloy rods used in PCB micro-drilling manufacturing, dedicated extrusion forming and detection equipment have been developed, which can process rod-shaped materials with internal cooling holes, improving the automation level and quality consistency. The related detection equipment is used to determine the bending strength of the rods.