Engineering ceramics such as alumina, zirconia, silicon nitride and silicon carbide can now be manufactured reliably with reproducible properties As such, they are of increasing interest to industry, particularly for use in demanding environments, where their thermomechanical performance is of critical importance, with applications ranging from fuel cells to cutting tools One aspect common to virtually all applications of engineering ceramics is that eventually they must be joined with another material, most usually a metal The joining of engineering ceramics to metals is not always easy There are two main considerations The first consideration is the basic difference in atomic bonding: the ionic or covalent bonding of the ceramic, compared to the metallic bond The second consideration is the mismatch in the coefficient of thermal expansion In general, ceramics have a lower coefficient of thermal expansion than metals and, if high tensile forces are produced in the ceramic, either a

Joining of engineering ceramics

The purpose of this paper is to present progress made since 1998 in understanding and modeling reactive wetting in metal/ceramic systems. The paper focuses on the two published analyses of reactive wetting leading to very different descriptions of both thermodynamics and kinetics of this phenomenon: the analysis proposed by author’s group and the analysis presented by Saiz et al.

Progress in understanding and modeling reactive wetting of metals on ceramics

The wettability of ceramics by liquid metals is discussed from both the fundamental point of view and the point of view of applications. The role of interfacial reactions (simple dissolution of the solid in the liquid or formation of a layer of a new compound) is illustrated and analysed. Several results are presented in order to illustrate the role of wettability in materials processing, namely infiltration processing, joining dissimilar materials by brazing and selecting crucibles for crystallising liquid metals and semiconductors. The review includes results obtained during the last 15 years mainly, but not only, by the Grenoble group.

Wetting by Liquid Metals—Application in Materials Processing: The Contribution of the Grenoble Group

https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstream/1810/248572/1/Ali%20et%20al%202015%20Acta%20Materialia.pdf

R. Voytovych

Papers

The relation between wetting and interfacial chemistry in the CuAgTi/alumina system