Effect of C/Ti ratio on densification, microstructure and mechanical properties of TiCx prepared by reactive spark plasma sintering

Titanium carbide (TiC) has been widely used as reinforcement in metal matrix composites and is known to exist over a wide range of stoichiometry. In this study, the effect of C/Ti ratio on the densification kinetics, grain size, lattice parameter, hardness and elastic modulus of TiCx prepared by reactive spark plasma sintering (RSPS) is presented. Commercial purity titanium was ball milled with 5, 7.5, 10, 12.5, 15 and 17.5 wt% carbon black powder for 5 h and subjected to RSPS to prepare TiCx samples with different C/Ti ratio. Dense TiCx samples with 'x′ ranging from 0.34 to 0.78 could be prepared by RSPS at 1400 °C. Increasing C/Ti ratio was found to increase the activation energy thereby reducing the rate of sintering and also resulted in finer grain size. The lattice parameter and the ratio of intensities of (200) to (111) peaks were correlated with the C/Ti ratio. The hardness and elastic modulus were shown to increase significantly with increase in C/Ti ratio.