Fabrication of high-purity ternary carbide Ti3SiC2 by spark plasma sintering technique

In this paper, polycrystalline bulk Ti3SiC2 samples were synthesized by spark plasma sintering (SPS) of TiC, Ti, Si, and Al powder mixtures. X-ray diffraction (XRD) and scanning electron microscope (SEM) were used for phase identification and microstructure evaluation. The results showed that addition of aluminum can considerably accelerate the synthesis reaction of Ti3SiC2 and fully dense, essentially single-phase polycrystalline Ti3SiC2 could be successfully obtained by sintering 2TiC/1Ti/1Si/0.2Al powders at 1250∼1300 °C. The process parameters in the sintering course revealed that addition of aluminum decreased the temperature for the synthesis reaction of Ti3SiC2. The density of the obtained Ti3SiC2 was 97.8% of the theoretical value. Also, it had Vickers hardness of 4 GPa (at 1 N and 30 s).