Production of B4C + TiB2 composite powder via dynamic / carbothermal reduction

Technical ceramics materials are used in defense, aviation and aerospace applications where cost is secondary and the performance is among the most important. Boron carbide (B4C) is a carbide based technical ceramic powder and is preferred for many applications due to its low density, high melting point and strength. Titanium diboride (TiB2), is made of boride-based technical ceramic materials and has found usage area because of its high temperature resistance. However, both materials are expensive to obtain and are not easily accessible due to existing production technologies, this limiting their widespread use. Apart from the raw materials, another reason for these materials being expensive is the necessity to use expensive sintering processes and it is extremely difficult to sinter them in the monolithic phase. The ability to achieve a non-porous structure requires to have very high temperatures (temperatures above 1800°C). In this study, an innovative method, dynamic / carbothermal reduction (DCR) and in addition carbothermal reduction (CR) was used in synthesizing B4C - TiB2 composite system, where TiB2 facilitates sintering of this system. Therefore, this study focuses on production of high quality (high purities, fine and uniaxial grains of homogeneous size distributions) of B4C - TiB2 composite powder. In this context, the B4C - TiB2 binary system was produced by using single-stage DCR technique under argon atmosphere at different parameters using boron oxide (B2O3), carbon black (C), titanium oxide (TiO2) and with minor amount of B4C additives. Powder production in composite form has been tried with DCR method for the first time for B4C and TiB2 binary composite powder system and successful results have been achieve.