Yasuhiro Kodera

Mechanical properties of β-SiC fabricated by spark plasma sintering

The consolidation of SiC nanopowder synthesized by the mechanical alloying method was subsequently accomplished by spark plasma sintering of 1700 °C for 10 min under an applied pressure of 40 MPa. The SiC sintered compact with relative density of 98% consisted of nano-sized particles smaller than 100 nm. This phenomenon resulted in the ordering process of stacking disordered structure formed by mechanical alloying. In this work, the effect of grain size and relative density on the mechanical properties were studied. The mechanical properties of sintered compacts were evaluated and compared with the reference samples fabricated from the commercial SiC powder (β-SiC, 0.3 µm, IBIDEN Co., Gifu, Japan) with sintering additive (B–C mixture). The Vickers hardness and bending strength of those sintered compacts increased with the increment of the density. However, the mechanical properties were lower than those of reference samples in case of lower density, even though the mechanical property was close to that of reference sample in case of higher density. This phenomenon was considered for the difference of bond strength between grains because those sintered compacts were fabricated without any sintering additives, while those reference samples were fabricated by accelerating the grain bonding with a sintering additive of B–C mixture. In other words, those results indicated that the effect of sintering additive affected on mechanical properties directly.