Stress-dislocation interaction mechanism in low-temperature thermo-compression sintering of Ag NPs

The sintering of metal nanoparticles (NPs) has been widely studied in the field of nanotechnology, and low-temperature sintering has become the industry standard. In this study, a molecular dynamics (MD) model was established to study the sintering behaviour of silver NPs during low-temperature thermo-compression. Primarily, we studied the sintering process, in which the ratio of neck radius to particle radius (x/r) changes. Under a uniaxial pressure, the maximum ratio in the temperature range 420–425 K was 1. According to the change of x/r, the process can be broken down into three stages: the neck-formation stage, neck-growth stage, and neck-stability stage. In addition, the relationship between potential energy, internal stress, and dislocation density during sintering is discussed. The results showed that cycling internal stress played an important role in sintering. Under the uniaxial pressure, the stress-dislocation interaction was found to be the major mechanism for thermo-compression sintering because the plastic deformation product dislocation intensified the diffusion of atoms. Also, the displacement vector, the mean square displacement, and the changing crystal structure during sintering were studied.