Modelling of inoculation of metallic melts : Application to grain refinement of aluminium by Al-Ti-B

Lineal Intercept Technique for Measuring Grain Size in Two-Phase Polycrystalline Ceramics

A systematic study of various spark plasma sintering (SPS) parameters, namely temperature, holding time, heating rate, pressure, and pulse sequence, was conducted to investigate their effect on the densification, grain-growth kinetics, hardness, and fracture toughness of a commercially available submicrometer-sized Al 2 O 3 powder. The obtained experimental data clearly show that the SPS process enhances both densification and grain growth. Thus, Al 2 O 3 could be fully densified at a much lower temperature (1150°C), within a much shorter time (minutes), than in more conventional sintering processes. It is suggested that the densification is enhanced in the initial part of the sintering cycle by a local spark-discharge process in the vicinity of contacting particles, and that both grain-boundary diffusion and grain-boundary migration are enhanced by the electrical field originating from the pulsed direct current used for heating the sample. Both the diffusion and the migration that promote the grain growth were found to be strongly dependent on temperature, implying that it is possible to retain the original fine-grained structure in fully densified bodies by avoiding a too high sintering temperature. Hardness values in the range 21-22 GPa and fracture toughness values of 3.5 ± 0.5 MPa.m 1/2 were found for the compacts containing submicrometer-sized Al 2 O 3 grains.

Spark Plasma Sintering of Alumina

https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00938352/document

Carbon nanotube-metal-oxide nanocomposites: microstructure, electrical conductivity and mechanical properties

Nickel coarsening in annealed Ni/8YSZ anode substrates for solid oxide fuel cells

A model is proposed which realistically characterizes the grain structure of polycrystalline ceramics. The average grain size of a log-normal distribution of grain sizes with tetrakaidecahedral (truncated octahedral) shape is related to the average intercept size by a proportionality constant. This result can be used to determine the average grain size of a sintered powder compact composed of nontextured grains which shows no discontinuous grain growth.

Mel I. Mendelson

Papers

Average Grain Size in Polycrystalline Ceramics