The effect of milling condition on the formation of nanostructures: Synthesis of vanadium carbides

Abstract

The mechanical alloying process (MA), has been successfully used to synthesize a number of commercially important alloys and composites. High-energy ball-milling is generally used to mechanically alloy metallic powder and develop microstructural changes to enhance structure dependent properties. Mechanical alloying is usually carried on in commercially available milling devices as: vibratory ball mills or planetary mills. These ball mills, designed mainly for pulverization of ceramics, have very limited control of the milling process. It can be noticed that in commercial ball mills the maximum milling condition has been selected to reduce the milling time. Available adjustment of the milling energies is limited to a narrow range. There are certain disadvantages to that near fixed characteristic in studying of the effect of milling condition on the formation of nanostructures. None of the commercially available devices was designed with the specific needs of the MA process in mind. In this work ball milling was performed using a locally designed ball mill with precise control of milling parameters. The effect of milling intensity on the formation of nanostructures and, in consequence, of V{sub 2}C and VC intermetallics, is described in this paper.