Abstract
It has recently been shown that porous tungsten can be sintered at much lower temperatures (T<1200°C) than those employed in conventional sintering techniques (T>2000°C). This was achieved by the addition of a small amount of aluminium to tungsten at the powder preparation stage. As a result, homogeneous microstructures with uniform porosity distributions were obtained. This short article presents some of the results from the tests conducted, using the reactive sintered compacts as cathodes in flashlamps. The results were found to be encouraging. However, the blackening of the quartz lamp was observed after a certain amount of time (3–20 h) suggesting sputtering, with some grey deposits accumulating on the surface of the cathode. Further improvements are anticipated by focusing on the optimisation of the structure/performance relationship.
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