Journal of the American Ceramic Society, Vol.101, No.9, 3773-3779, 2018
Insights into microstructural formation of pulse plasma semisolid to liquid processing of Al2O3-ZrO2 eutectic ceramics
This present work concentrated on a novel one-step pulse discharge plasma melting method, directly from a powder mixture of nano-sized Al2O3-ZrO2(Y2O3) to insitu fabricate Al2O3-ZrO2 binary eutectic in a short processing time. A continuous transition from submicro-sized polycrystalline to non-equilibrium eutectic was traced based on pulse discharge plasma semisolid to liquid processing. The uniform colony microstructure with an average inter-lamellar or inter-rod spacing of similar to 200nm was obtained at a growth rate of similar to 275m/s, and the inter-lamellar or inter-rod spacing was a good fit for the inverse-square-root dependence of the growth rate as (a)=3.32xv(-1/2).