Usually porous metals are known as relatively excellent characteristic such as large surface area, light, lower heat capacity, high toughness and permeability for exhaust gas filter, hydrogen reformer catalyst support. The Ni alloys have high corrosion resistance, heat resistance and chemical stability for high temperature applications. In this study, the Ni-based porous metals have been developed with Hastelloy powder by gas atomization and water atomization in order to find the effects of powder shape on porous metal. Each Hastelloy powder is pressed on disk shape of 2 mm thickness with 12 tons using uniaxial press machine. The specimens are sintered at various temperatures in high vacuum condition. The pore properties were evaluated using Porometer and microstructures were observed with SEM.

In this study, a SUS316L membrane having double layered pore structures was fabricated, and the pore characteristics were analyzed after coating with a spherical powder and a flake-shaped powder on a disk-shaped SUS316L support using a wet powder spraying process. The thickness of the coated layer was checked using an optical microscope, and air permeability was measured using a capillary flow porometer. When the coating amount was similar, the fine porous layer prepared using flake powder was thicker and showed higher porosity. In the case of a similar thickness, the case of using flake powder was half of the amount of spherical powder used. Therefore, it was confirmed that it is possible to manufacture a metal membrane having a high filter efficiency even with a small coating amount when using the flake powder.

In this study, 316L stainless steel powder was used to produce a porous body that could be used in a specific environment. In contrast to the existing method of producing filters using only spherical powders, we attempted to produce filters using plate- and needle-like powders and evaluated their performance. In the powder preparation step, the shape change of the powder was analyzed by changing the size of the stainless-steel balls used for ball milling. Then, the variations in properties of the sintered porous body caused by the ball size were investigated. As the average ball size decreased, the average particle size of the powder decreased. Moreover, the surface area and pore size of the porous body decreased. Additionally, when balls of different sizes were mixed, the porous body showed a mixture of coarse and fine pores.