Powder quality, including high flowability and spherical shape, determines the properties of additively manufactured products. Therefore, the cheap production of high-quality powders is critical in additive manufacturing. Radio frequency plasma treatment is an effective method to fabricate spherical powders by melting the surface of irregularly shaped powders; in the present work, mechanically milled Zr powders are spheroidized by radio frequency plasma treatment and their properties are compared with those of commercial Zircaloy-2 alloy powder. Spherical Zr particles are successfully fabricated by plasma treatment, although their flowability and impurity contents are poorer than those of the commercial Zircaloy-2 alloy powder. This result shows that radio-frequency plasma treatment with mechanically milled powders requires further research and development for manufacturing low-cost powders for additive manufacturing.

ZrB₂ ceramic and ZrB₂ ceramic composites with the addition of SiC, WC, and SiC/WC are successfully synthesized by a spark plasma sintering method. During high-temperature oxidation, SiC additive form a SiO₂ amorphous outer scale layer and SiC-deplete ZrO₂ scale layer, which decrease the oxidation rate. WC addition forms WO₃ during the oxidation process to result in a ZrO₂/WO₃ liquid sintering layer, which is known to improve the antioxidation effect. The addition of SiC and WC to ZrB₂ reduces the oxygen effective diffusivity by one-fifth of that of ZrB₂. The addition of both SiC and WC shows the formation of a SiO₂ outer dense glass layer and ZrO₂/WO₃ layer so that the anti-oxidation effect is improved three times as much as that of ZrB₂. Therefore, SiC- and WC-added ZrB₂ has a lower two-order oxygen effective diffusivity than ZrB₂; it improves the anti-oxidation performance 3 times as much as that of ZrB₂.

Citations

Citations to this article as recorded by  

• Role of TiC and WC Addition on the Mechanism and Kinetics of Isothermal Oxidation and High-Temperature Stability of ZrB2–SiC Composites
  Pradyut Sengupta, Indranil Manna
  High Temperature Corrosion of Materials.2024;[Epub]     CrossRef