Study on the solid-phase sintering of the nano-structured heavy tungsten alloy powder

Recently, the high performance W–Ni–Fe–Co heavy tungsten alloy has become as the major core material of armor piercing ammunition. Since the melting temperature of tungsten element is too high to be fabricated by the melting process, that the W–Ni–Fe–Co alloy only can be synthesized by powder metallurgy process. In this study, two compositions of alloy powders, 93W–3Ni–2Fe–2Co and 93W–3.5Ni–1.5Fe–2Co, were selected for investigating their microstructure and mechanical properties after solid-phase sintering. These pre-alloyed powders with crystal cell size about 16 nm were synthesized by mechanical alloying (MA) the mixture of appropriate composition of pure elements in the Spex mill for 8 h. Then, the MA powders were compressed by cold isostatic pressing (CIP) and vacuum sintered at various temperature below 1400 °C for different time. Microstructure characterization of the sintered tungsten heavy alloys was conducted by means of SEM with EDS capability, X-ray diffraction (XRD), and TEM techniques. The result reveals that the microstructure of these sintered alloys was found to consist of the tungsten matrix phase and the Fe–Ni solid solution phase. The hardness of these sintered tungsten heavy alloy presents a trend with increasing sintering temperature and sintering time.