In recent years, there has been lot of interest to use microwave technology for sintering of metal powder compacts in order to take advantage of certain features such as the reduced cycle time, the volumetric and selective heating, and highly efficient processes offered by the microwave processing. It has been reported that the microwaves can provide improved mechanical properties along with the finer microstructures.  However, the concept behind the microwave sintering of metal powder compacts has not been fully understood till now, as it is well known that the metals usually reflect microwaves and hence the typical volumetric heating phenomenon cannot be held entirely responsible in this case.  The main goal of this project is to carry out a systematic study and the associated experimental investigations on sintering behaviors of commonly used metal powders, by combining the expertise of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany in the field of microwave material processing, and that of Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur (IITK), India in the field of microwave modeling and characterization. The detailed study would involve the modeling of these metal powders as specialized composites thereby introducing the concept of the complex effective permittivity and permeability, which would then be retrieved by measuring the scattering parameters and making use of in-house developed algorithms. It is also planned to carry out online measurements of temperature distribution and the DC conductivity during the sintering process of metal powder compacts, by varying their composition and the green density, in a 30 GHz high power microwave system, and comparing the results with the conventional methods. These investigations will be analyzed in detail with the help of SEM, EDX and the optical microscopy in order to fully understand the observed effects