Abstract
Keywords - Materials, Pump, Injection, Valve Train, Performance
Abstract - The Powder Metallurgy (PM) process is widely recognized and increasingly used in the automotive industry. Its growth is due to the ease with which large volumes of small mechanical components are manufactured economically and with high repetitive quality. Usually the materials used to produce PM parts are based on iron alloys (about 80% of sintered iron is used in the automotive industry). However recent technological advances demand components to withstand severe operating conditions such as impact, heavy load, high pressure, corrosion and high temperature. Cemented carbides are the only materials proven to simultaneously fulfill all these requirements. Furthermore, these properties are obtained with no need for additional heat treatment or surface coating thanks to the inner basis of a powder sintering process.
The first part of this paper deals with the PM process applied to these materials, and the properties achieved with different grades of cemented carbide. Following this, some automotive application examples and possibilities are presented.