Abstract:
Our country relies on foreign imported products to satisfy its technological and industrial needs.
The associated spare parts of all the imported equipment’s and machineries are also imported.
Machineries and related imports consistently rank among the top imported items in recent years.
For example, in 2017 G.C. alone electromechanical related imports amounted to 6.77 billion
USD, which is about 40% of the total import. Among these 1.4 billion USD is allocated for spare
parts related import. Hence this research tries to address the problem by starting a technology
transfer to manufacture spare parts locally.
The second part of the research is about the specific benefits, advantages and disadvantages of
the powder metallurgy in relation to manufacturing components/spare parts. Globally seventy
percent of the powder metallurgy products are used as automotive components. This comes in
with the advantage of low cost at higher production volume.
After exploring the powder metallurgy technology, different solutions/concepts are developed to
produce a gear for automotive application. Different concepts are developed for each subsystem
of the powder metallurgy processing system. For the powder production four concepts are
developed while for the other subsystems two concepts are developed. These concepts are
evaluated against a criteria and a final overall concept is developed.
Based on the concepts, the thermal design of each subsystem is developed. The first subsystem
designed is the powder production system. This subsystem included the atomizer for
disintegrating the melt to particles and a water cooling system for removing the heat energy. To
achieve the required cooling rate a 21L/sec at 5
0C water is required. The second subsystem is
the shaping-compaction subsystem. Its main goal is to create a dense mold of the gear. It is a
mosaic of warm powder feeding mechanism, vibrating mechanism for both compaction and
achieve uniform pouring and a dynamic pressing mechanism. This subsystem has a maximum
capacity of producing 900 units per hour. The final subsystem designed is the sintering furnace.
It was designed to be a continuously producing furnace with the capacity of sintering up to
12500C (for all steel alloys) and 500 kg/hr while maintaining inert environment.
This design marks the beginning of a research based technology transfer. Some of the systems
components are determined to be manufacturable in Ethiopia. Others need to be purchased both
locally and internationally.
