Grain Growth in Dilute Tungsten Heavy Alloys during Liquid-Phase Sintering under Microgravity Conditions

Tungsten heavy alloys with compositions ranging from 35 to 93 wt pct tungsten were liquid-phase sintered at 1500 °C under microgravity conditions for isothermal hold times ranging from 1 to 600 minutes. The solid-volume fraction, grain size, grain size distribution, connectivity, and contiguity of the sintered microstructures were quantitatively measured. From these data, grain-growth-rate constants are determined for solid-volume fractions ranging from 0.048 to 0.858 and are compared to the predictions of several grain-coarsening models. The measured grain size distributions are shown to be self-similar and are fit to a Weibull distribution. Three-dimensional (3-D) grain size distributions from several coarsening models are transformed into grain size distributions for two-dimensional (2-D) cross sections, for comparison with the experimental data. Chi-squared tests and G-tests show that a coalescence model for grain growth fits the experimental observations better than solution-reprecipitation models, even for dilute tungsten heavy alloys.