PM and Sintered Gears
The development of powder metallurgy has contributed to improvement of sintered gears’ properties and stability of sintered gears’ dimension. And warm compacting, high speed compacting, sintered hardening, high temperature sintering, infiltration and surface densification has been developed and applied well, which will achieve the production of sintered gears with high density, low cost and high accuracy.
PM and Auto Industry
As the important parts in transmission system, normally, gears are made by machining lathe. However, with the development of auto industry, it’s more and stricter to requirements of gears and other car parts, such as cost, delivery time, pollution, etc, these machining can not meet anymore. And powder metallurgy is a technology that is available for complex parts with fewer material, energy, workforce and good quality, and is suited for mass production, which well meets the requirements of auto industry. So powder metallurgy industry is related closely to auto industry. In USA, auto industry shares more than 70% in the market of iron alloy powder metallurgy parts.
By the statistics in March 2004, in China it just shared 19%.
Developed Sintered Parts
Powder metallurgy is very available for gears with complex geometry and high strength. Nowadays, powder metallurgy could achieve the density of 7.5g/cm3 by advanced compacting, sintering and other special follow-up processes, which have made powder metallurgy replac machining and other conventional manufacturing processings. Powder metallurgy could make great properties and low cost possible.
And the development of auto industry require higher requirement for powder metallurgy industry.