Effect of the mechanical alloying on the Ti3SiC2 formation by spark plasma sintering from Ti/Si/C powders

The effect of preceding mechanical alloying on titanium silicon carbide (Ti3SiC2) formation from a powder mixture of 5Ti/2Si/3C through spark plasma sintering technique as well as the mechanical property of the bulk material was investigated in this paper. The results showed that mechanical alloying can significantly improve the density of the obtained bulk material via the particles refinement as well as the microhardness by increasing the TiC content. The corresponding relative density of the spark plasma sintered samples from elemental powders of Ti/Si/C and the previously mechanically alloyed ones were calculated to be respectively 93.20% and 99.82%. The measured microhardness values of the different samples were respectively about 462 and 955 Hv.

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► Spark plasma sintering technique used for simultaneous synthesis and consolidation of Ti3SiC2.
► Study of the effect of the previous mechanical alloying of the starting elemental powder mixture on sintered samples.
► Purity of Ti3SiC2 was not improved by the previous mechanical alloying of the starting elemental powder mixture.
► Density and microhardness of the previously mechanically alloyed powder mixture was enhanced.