Infiltration of Molten Silicon in a Porous Body of B 4 C Under Microwave Heating
Résumé
This chapter presents the microstructure and mechanical properties of reaction bonding B4C infiltrated by silicon using microwave (2.45GHz) heating. The chapter discusses how boron carbide is an attractive material for various applications that require high hardness and neutron absorption. Fully dense boron carbide bodies are usually fabricated using hot pressing at temperatures above 2000 °C. An alternative route to decrease the production costs is the reaction bonded technique (RBBC). The metal can react with residual carbon and boron carbide to form carbide. This technique was extensively studied using conventional furnace in an experiment. The influence of the initial porosity was found to be increasingly important when it was higher than 67%. The chapter concludes how hardness is strongly depended on the initial density and almost no dependency found on the infiltration temperature. The residual porosity is slightly influenced by the dwell temperature and the initial density.