No abstract

Stainless steel fiber felt is a class of unique porous metal materials. This study investigates the effect of pre-annealing on the sintering of stainless steel fiber felt through quantitative characterization of sintered joints based on synchrotron radiation experiments. The sintered joint size was found to follow a marked normal distribution in fiber felt samples sintered with and without pre-annealing. However, pre-annealing prior to sintering led to a significant reduction in the total number of sintered joints as well as a reduction in the percentage of large sintered joints. Consequently, fiber felt samples sintered with pre-annealing achieved less than half the tensile strength of those sintered without pre-annealing. Delamination through fracture of sintered joints was pronounced in fiber felt samples sintered with pre-annealing, while failure occurred mainly through fracture of individual fibers in those sintered without pre-annealing. It was concluded that sintering without pre-annealing is necessary for the fabrication of high-strength fiber felt products and the reasons are briefly discussed.

Porous metal fiber media (PMFM) is a kind of advanced structural and functional material, and it has attracted a wide spread attention owing to excellent sound absorption performance. The sound absorption property of PMFM is mainly influenced by the fiber diameter, the average pore size and thickness of PMFM. In the paper, three stainless steel fibers with the diameters (∅) of 8, 12 and 20 µm were used to make PMFM with the average pore sizes of 10, 20, 30 and 40 µm and the thicknesses of 1, 2 and 3 mm by air-laid and sintering processes. The sound absorption coefficients of PMFM were tested in impedance tube using two-microphone transfer-function method according to ISO 10534-2 and ASTM E1050-98 international standards at room temperature. The results show that when the frequency ranges from 50 Hz to 6,400 Hz in material with the average pore size of 20 µm and the thickness of 3 mm and the fiber diameter of ∅8 µm, the average sound absorption coefficient is the highest.

The images for Fig. 5 were inadvertently transposed during production. They are given below with the proper labeling.