Influence of the amount of recycled cemented carbide powder on the mechanical properties of WC-Co parts sintered by unconventional technologies

The trend in the cemented carbide field is to reduce the use of raw cobalt powder in tungsten carbide parts and to develop new binders: indeed, the cobalt price fluctuates extremely due to different factors, mainly its massive use in batteries of electrical vehicles, and its extraction as by-product of copper and nickel mining.
The use of a recycled tungsten-cobalt carbide powder skirts the cobalt problem and allows the sintering of WC-Co parts without raw Co powder. In this study, the material is composed of two powders: a powder made from raw materials (WC and Co powders mixed togethers) and a recycled powder (crushed powder containing 7.5 wt.% Co). HIP and SPS are used as sintering technologies before morphological and mechanical characterizations. Mechanical properties of these samples can be tuned with the addition of recycled powder and the parts resulting from the experiments are in total competition with conventional ones.