Enhancements on fast sintering systems promote transfer from the lab to industrial applications

In the last decade many laboratories dealing with the development of powder metallic materials as well as engineering and functional ceramics worked on field assisted rapid sintering methods, in particular FAST/SPS. This resulted in a huge number of scientific papers, describing a wide range of innovative materials and production concepts. But now it becomes more and more important to exploit these achievements by applying it for the industrial manufacturing of real parts. In many cases this requires new and extended performance features of the FAST/SPS technology as well as an application-oriented tailoring of the respective sintering systems in opposite to the classical all-purpose lab systems. The presentation will show a short overview of this evolution as well as examples of current applications in the field of material development and industrial production. It will also be demonstrated, how new extensions, e.g. hybrid technology or flash sintering, can lead to essential progress in the development of innovative materials and thereby enable a wide spectrum of new industrial applications. An outlook of future hardware developments will complete the overview.