Preparation of zirconia toughened mullite by thermal plasma

Correlation between properties of zirconia mullite and Y2O3stabilised zirconia mullite derived by various processing techniques

“…Various processing techniques, such as solid state sintering, thermal plasma fusion, sol-gel, etc., are adopted for the synthesis of MUZ composites. [3][4][5][6][7] However, always, a chemical reaction is exploited to yield zirconia toughened mullite by controlling the microstructure to achieve a higher densified product for industrial applications. Especially, zirconia increases the sintering rate of mullite in solid solutions, 8 and as secondarry phase, it acts like a grain growth inhibitor 8 and a transformation toughening agent.…”

A Comparative Study of CaO-MUZ Composites Elaboration by Plasma Melting and Sintering Techniques

“…It is expected to enhance the reaction kinetics, which in turn reduces the processing time to 5 minutes. Hence, thermal plasma is used as the high temperature tool to obtain the melt [10]. Plasma sintering is known to be a rapid sintering process which proceeds under partial melt condition to inhibit the grain growth and gain control over the microstructure.…”

“…The schematic picture of the thermal plasma reactor is given in Fig. 1, and the details of the reactor are discussed briefly elsewhere [10]. A water-cooled stainless steel double-walled cylindrical chamber (outer) was fixed with suitable thermal insulation like bubble alumina for the confinement of plasma heating.…”

“…The mixed powders in the required ratio were fed into the plasma reactor and were directly exposed to plasma for five minutes with a plasma power of 15 kW (300 A-DC current and 50 V-DC voltages) for the synthesis of fused CaO-MUZ. The synthesis of fused CaO-MUZ takes place in the liquid state of alumina, silica, and zirconia [10] in the DC extended thermal plasma reactor. It is expected to enhance the reaction kinetics, which in turn reduces the processing time to five minutes.…”

Novel route for combustion synthesis of zirconia–mullite/TiB2 composites

“…Similarly, a variety of mullite preparation methods has been developed such as reaction sintering of mechanically mixed powders [7][8][9][10][11], hydrothermal treatment of mixtures of sols [12][13][14] and chemical vapour deposition [15][16][17][18]. On the other hand, different routes have been used for manufacturing of zirconia-mullite composites from mullite-zirconia or alumina-zircon mixture such as plasma spray using plasma arc [19][20][21], reaction sintering at elevated temperatures [22][23][24][25][26], crystallization of rapidly quenched melts of ZrO 2 -Al 2 O 3 -SiO 2 [27] and liquid infiltration technique [28]. Of these preparation methods, reaction sintering is the most commonly used one because of its cheap raw materials and simple procedure.…”