Development of nano metal powders for ultra-low fire MLC inner electrodes

Abstract

The need to reduce metal content, especially Palladium content in the multi layer ceramic components is driven by two motives. The first is the need to reduce material costs which has become a major issue due to the sharp rise and instability of palladium price. The second motive is the need to build components with ever-growing number of layers, in order to achieve better performance. In this paper, a series of new metal powders, which were developed by NanoPowders Industries (NPI), will be discussed. These powders vary in composition, from pure silver, to silver-palladium, silver-platinum and silver-gold alloys. These powders are of very fine particle size. They open a broad working window for MLC design. The different properties of the powders will be discussed in this paper, including melting and sintering behavior.