In this paper, rare-earth fluorides were used as sintering additives instead of rare-earth oxides, the influence of the type and the amount of the fluoride on the thermal conductivity, hardness and strength of Si3N4 ceramics was studied. Results show that the thermal conductivity of a sample sintered with CeF3 is nearly 10% higher than that of the sample sintered with Ce2O3, while the samples sintered with LaF3 increases further 15% as comparing with the samples sintered with CeF3. The strength of the samples changes reversely. These results express that the thermal conductivity of Si3N4 ceramics can be improved by using rare-earth fluoride additives instead of the oxides, and the type of rare-earth fluorides has a significant impact on the properties of Si3N4 ceramics.

High thermal conductive Si3N4 is a promising candidate for producing high quality ceramic substrates used in vehicles. Although a lot of researches have been carried out on the tape casting of Si3N4, they were mainly restricted in fabricating thin films with a thickness less than 200μm which are not sufficient for producing substrate. With larger thickness, tapes tend to crack during drying. In this work, slurry of α-Si3N4 with Y2O3-MgO as additives was prepared using an azeotropic mixture of methylisobutylketone/methyehtylketone/cyclohexanone as media. To obtain thick green tapes, the amount of dispersant, binder and plasticizer in the slurry were optimized, and the effects of drying temperature on the cracking behavior of the tape were studied. By controlling the composition of the slurry and the drying conditions, thick green tapes with thicknesses up to 1.8mm were successfully fabricated, and Si3N4 substrates were produced after subsequent gas-pressing sintering, which were flat and had a relative density as high as 98.2%.

In order to completely avoid the inter-axis coupling phenomenon in the triaxial force measurement process and improve the measurement accuracy, an air-supported force measurement method considering both supporting and force measurement is proposed. Based on this, a triaxial force measurement device without inter-axis coupling is constructed. The model of air-supported one-axis force measuring unit and air-supported triaxial force measurement device are established. An air-supported triaxial force measurement platform is developed to explore the measurement accuracy of the force in each axial direction and the Inter-axis coupling phenomenon. The experimental results show that the air-supported triaxial force measurement platform has the characteristics of '' no Inter-axis coupling'' and ''high precision''. The measurement error of the air-supported triaxial force measurement platform is 0.17% in the x-axis direction and 0.10% in the y-axis direction.

A large liquid crystal glass substrate detection instrument usually uses the air flotation platform to support a glass substrate. The glass substrate will be deformed by air pressure on the air flotation platform, which will affect the accuracy of detection. In this paper, combined with the characteristics of the detection method of the detection instrument, an optimal detection scanning path with the minimum deflection variation range of the glass substrate is planned so as to minimize the influence of glass substrate deformation on the detection accuracy. In theory, the calculation model of the deflection variation ranges of different paths on the glass substrate is established, the numerical method is used to solve it, and finally, the optimal scanning path for the optical inspection is obtained. The experimental results verify the correctness of the model.

The deformation of large glass substrate in air-flotation system affects detection accuracy of inspection instrument. According to the gas lubrication theory, Timoshenko’s thin film theory and the simulation figure of the pressure distribution of the air film flow field, the air load distribution model of the air film is established, and the deformation expression of the large liquid crystal glass substrate in air-flotation system is given. On this basis, a theoretical design method for designing nozzle pitch of orifice throttling air-flotation system was proposed. Combined with examples, the results of theories and simulation are compared. An experiment on the deformation of the glass substrate was carried out on an experimental prototype. The difference between the experimental results and the theoretical results does not exceed 10%.