“…Backhaus-Ricoult, 1992;Bhanumurthy & SchmidFetzer, 2001;Park, 1999). In the reaction zone, it has been observed that the diffusion couple shows alternating layers of C and Ni-silicides (900C, 24 h or 40 h) (Bhanumurthy & SchmidFetzer, 2001;Park et al, 1999), or alternating silicide bands and silicide bands with embedded C (950C, 1.5 h) (Backhaus-Ricoult, 1992). From the back-scattered electron imaging (BSE) (Park et al, 1999) of a Ni/SiC reaction couple annealed at 900°C for 40 h, the sequence of phases in bulk diffusion couples was observed to be Ni/Ni 3 Si/Ni 5 Si 2 +C/Ni 2 Si +C/SiC.…”