Spark Plasma Sintering of Commercial Zirconium Carbide Powders: Densification Behavior and Mechanical Properties

Materials

Xialu Wei¹  Christina Back³  Oleg Izhvanov³  Oleg L. Khasanov²  Christopher D. Haines⁴  Eugene A. Olevsky¹ 

[1] Department of Mechanical Engineering, College of Engineering, San Diego State University, 5500 Campanile Dr., San Diego, CA 92182, USA; E-Mail:;National Research Tomsk Polytechnic University, Tomsk 634650, Russian; E-Mail:;General Atomics, 3550 General Atomics Ct., San Diego, CA 92121, USA; E-Mails:;US Army Armament Research Development Engineering Center, Picatinny Arsenal, NJ 07806, USA; E-Mail:

关键词: zirconium carbide (ZrC);    spark plasma sintering (SPS);    power-law creep (PLC);    transverse rupture strength (TRS);    microhardness (H_v);   

DOI  :  10.3390/ma8095289

来源: mdpi

【 摘 要 】

Commercial zirconium carbide (ZrC) powder is consolidated by Spark Plasma Sintering (SPS). Processing temperatures range from 1650 to 2100 °C. Specimens with various density levels are obtained when performing single-die SPS at different temperatures. Besides the single-die tooling setup, a double-die tooling setup is employed to largely increase the actual applied pressure to achieve higher densification in a shorter processing time. In order to describe the densification mechanism of ZrC powder under SPS conditions, a power-law creep constitutive equation is utilized, whose coefficients are determined by the inverse regression of the obtained experimental data. The densification of the selected ZrC powder is shown to be likely associated with grain boundary sliding and dislocation glide controlled creep. Transverse rupture strength and microhardness of sintered specimens are measured to be up to 380 MPa and 24 GPa, respectively. Mechanical properties are correlated with specimens’ average grain size and relative density to elucidate the co-factor dependencies.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© 2015 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.