Safa Khodabakhsh¹, Ashley Paz y Puente¹; ¹University of Cincinnati

The recent increase in utilization of powder feedstock based additive manufacturing techniques to 3D print complex structures necessitates the investigation of variations in the sintering behavior of loosely packed powders as compared to traditionally compacted powder metallurgy structures. In this study, particle-based ink extrusion, where the ink contains the material to be printed in powder form, a polymer binder, and a tri-solvent mixture, was used to print Ni and Ni-Cr metallic scaffolds. To fabricate the Ni-Cr scaffolds both mixed elemental powders and pre-alloyed powders were used in the ink to quantify the differences in sintering kinetics resulting from an additional composition-based driving force. Here we discuss the measurement of sintering kinetics of such 3D printed samples investigated using a combination of traditional metallography and X-ray tomography.