The sintering of nitrides of the transition metals

Abstract

1. An investigation was made into the conditions of sintering of nitrides of the refractory transition metals by the methods of vacuum heating of precompacted blanks, hot pressing, and reactive sintering, consisting in the nitriding of precompacted blanks from metal powders. The optimum conditions have been established for the sintering of nitrides by all these methods, and the advantages of the reactive sintering method, which permits the preparation of impurity-free nitride parts, have been demonstrated. 2. It has been shown that the process of sintering nitrides of the transition metals is directly linked with the character of electron density distribution in the lattices of nitride phases; this, in turn, is governed by the degree of incompleteness of the d-electron shells of the corresponding transition metals and the nitrogen content of the nitride phases.