The Spark Plasma Sintering Process (SPS) has recently attracted the attention of the powder metallurgy industry. The process sinters powder metallurgical material packed in a die by applying both pulsed current and pressure at the same time. The process has several advantages such as the capability to sinter materials that are difficult to process with a conventional sintering, the productivity increase by reduced sintering time, and easy operation by unskilled operators.

We have developed a 500-ton spark plasma-sintering machine and a rotary-type sintering machine for future business development. The former has been designed to process large products of a commercial size, expanding a laboratory device to sinter small size products for experimental purposes. The latter is a device intended to improve sintering productivity.

To make high quality products, SPS sintering should be implemented under uniform temperature and stress. We have developed software for analyzing the temperature and stress distribution in SPS products for obtaining optimum sintering conditions. This paper reports the effectiveness of the software to design dies, comparing the experimental results and the software predictions.