This paper presents an original viscoelastic model of powder sintering developed within the discrete element framework. The viscous model used by other authors has been enriched by adding a spring connected in series to the viscous rheological element. In this way elastic and viscous effects in the particle interaction during sintering are treated using the Maxwell viscoelasticity. The new numerical model has been verified through simulation of simple problems of free sintering and sintering under pressure. Sintering processes have been treated as isothermic. In order to accelerate the analysis an algorithmic mass scaling has been used allowing to use larger time steps in the explicit time integration scheme. The results obtained using the new model are consistent with the standard viscous model. At the same time, a much better efficiency of the new model in comparison to the standard viscous one has been found because the critical time steps required by the viscoelastic model are much larger than those required by the viscous model. The new model has been applied to the simulation of real process of sintering of NiAl powder. The kinetics of sintering indicated by the evolution of density has been studied. The comparison of numerical and experimental results has shown a good performance of the developed numerical model. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.