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Abstract
Titanium diboride (TiB2) is considered one of the most suitable candidate materials for applications as wettable cathodes in redesigned aluminium smelting cells. In this work, titanium diboride compacts have been produced from powders using a wet colloidal processing approach combined with pressureless sintering for densification. The approach has good potential to reduce the manufacturing cost compared to hot-pressing. Owing to the elevated cost of the raw materials, the possibility of mixing powders with different particle sizes (more expensive fine and less expensive coarse powder) has been explored. The outcome of this study is very promising, since using two different particle sizes improved the particle packing of the green material resulting in sintered densities around 80% of the theoretical density at 2000°C.
Acknowledgements
The authors of this report acknowledge the work of the students Sarah Castelino, Allan Phu, Nicholas Chamberlain and Dennis Kurniawan during their Research Project subject. We thank Interdisciplinary Seed 2013 Funding from the University of Melbourne for the funding provided to work on this project. We specially thank Lynne Davies of Rio Tinto for providing the coarse TiB2 powder for this study. We thank Mr Samuel Pinches and Mr Roger Curtain for their help with the SEM images of the raw powder. Finally, we acknowledge Professor Robin Batterham for his continuous advice and help with this project and Professor Ludwig Gauckler for the very useful discussions about the framework and applications for this project.