Two-Step Sintering Applied to Ceramics

Abstract

During the process of sintering of ceramics, it is necessary to apply high temperature owing the high melting point of the raw materials. In general, a ceramist, wishing to produce a material with particular properties, must identify the required microstructure and then design processing conditions that will produce this required microstructure (Lutgard et al., 2003). One of the options to adapt the microstructure is a technique called two step sintering (TSS), this technique has been applied to the sintering of ceramic oxides to achieve full density without grain growth in final stage of sintering without loss densification (Chen & Wand, 2000). The two-step sintering process consists in to heat a ceramic body to a peak temperature (T1) to achieve an intermediate density and then the temperature is reduced to a dwell temperature (T2), which is held till full density is achieved. To succeed in two-step sintering, a sufficiently high relative density (70% or greater) needs to be achieved at T1 (Chen & Wang, 2000 & Chen, 2000). Once this critical density is reached, a lower temperature, T2, used for the isothermal hold will be sufficient to achieve full density. Difference between kinetics of grain boundary diffusion and grain boundary migration is used to obtain almost full dense, nanostructured ceramics. During the last stage of the sintering occur the grain growth in materials, this implicate in final properties, like mechanical resistance, density, ionic and electrical conductivity and others (Robert et al., 2003). The two-step sintering has been applied in many mateirals with the main goal of avoiding the grain growth in final stage of sintering, the results show the TSS is a technique efficient for it. Some application for two-step sintering are materials which need high density and small grain size, for example electrolytes of solid oxide fuel cell, as ceramics based in Y2O3 and CeO2, both with and without doppant (Wang et al., 2006; Wright, 2008 & Lapa, 2009). Others examples in which TSS are used also as nanostructural fosterite (Fathi, et al., 2009), alumina-zirconia ceramics (Wang et al., 2008), TiBaO3 and Ni-Cu-Zn Ferrite (Wang et al., 2006), ZnO (Shahraki et al., 2010). In this cases, the researchs are getting the relative density higher than 97% and the size grains in level sub-micrometer.