Abstract
The topic of this chapter is how to produce particles of a particular shape, chemistry, and size and then how to characterize them. We are going to describe the methods used to produce ceramic powders, from the traditional ball-milling technique to more recent vapor-phase approaches that can produce nanometer-sized particles. It is worth remembering that powder processing is used to produce some special metals (e.g., tungsten filaments for incandescent lamps), it is used in the pharmaceutical industry, for making catalysts, and it is used to prepare many food ingredients.
Producing powders of a consistent quality and composition is an important industry. In the United States the total market for powders of advanced ceramics (e.g., electronic and structural ceramics) alone is around $1 billion per year.
To specify powders for particular applications and products we need to be able to determine their physical and chemical characteristics, often with a high degree of accuracy and with statistical significance. In this chapter we will describe the different analytical techniques used for particle characterization and also indicate which technique works best. In addition to powders there are other important dimensionally constrained forms of ceramics. Whiskers and fibers are long in one dimension but restricted in the other two. Ceramics in these forms are important reinforcement phases in composites, such as
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C fibers in polymer-matrix composites (PMCs)
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Al2O3 fibers in metal-matrix composites (MMCs)
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SiC whiskers in ceramic-matrix composites (CMCs)
If the particles are constrained in only one dimension, we have platelets. The amount of space we devote to platelets does not correlate with their commercial importance: remember that clay particles are platelets. The excuse is that most platelet particles are produced in nature while we are concentrating on particles we “design.”
If we limit the size in two or three dimensions to less than 100 nm, we have nanomaterials.
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General References
Allen, T. (1997) Particle Size Measurements. Volume 1: Powder Sampling and Particle Size Measurements. Volume 2: Surface Area and Pore Size Determination, 5th. edition, Chapman & Hall, London. Comprehensive guides to particle size, surface area, and pore size measurements covering experimental methods and data analysis.
Chawla, K.K. (1993) Ceramic Matrix Composites, Chapman & Hall, London. A detailed description of CMCs.
Evans, J.W. and DeJonghe, L.C. (1991) The Production of Inorganic Materials, Macmillan Publishing Company, New York. Standard description of powder processing. Covers more than ceramics.
Matthews, F.L. and Rawlings, R.D. (1994) Composite Materials: Engineering and Science, Chapman & Hall, London. A standard composite textbook. At a similar level to this text.
Rahaman, M.N. (1995) Ceramic Processing and Sintering, Marcel Dekker, Inc., New York. A detailed description of ceramic powder processing.
Reed, J.S. (1988) Introduction to the Principles of Ceramic Processing, John Wiley & Sons, New York. A detailed description of powder processing.
Ring, T.A. (1996) Fundamentals of Ceramic Powder Processing and Synthesis, Academic Press, San Diego. Again with more detail on milling.
Segal, D. (1989) Chemical Synthesis of Advanced Ceramic Materials, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Specific References
Brunauer, S., Emmett, P.H., and Teller, E. (1938) “Adsorption of gases in multimolecular layers,” J. Am. Chem. Soc. 60, 309. The original BET paper; cited almost 7000 times.
LaMer, V.K. and Dinegar, R.H. (1950) “Theory, production and mechanism of formation of monodispersed hydrosols,” J. Am. Chem. Soc. 72, 4847.
Messing, G.L., Zhang, S-C., and Jayanthi, G.V. (1993) “Ceramic powder synthesis by spray-pyrolysis,” J. Am. Ceram. Soc. 76, 2707. A comprehensive review of spray pyrolysis.
Pechini, M.P. (1967) “Method of preparing lead and alkaline earth titanates and niobates and coating method using the same to form a capacitor,” U.S. Patent 3,330,697.
Suryanarayana, C. and Norton, M.G. (1998) X-Ray Diffraction: A Practical Approach, Plenum, New York. In particular, experimental module 6 shows how to determine particle size and experimental module 7 shows the method used to determine phase proportions in a powder mixture using XRD.
Vander Voort, G.F. (1984) Metallography: Principles and Practice, McGraw-Hill, New York, p. 435. Currently out of print. Although its title says it is for the metallurgist, it contains a detailed discussion of grain size determination that can be applied equally well to nonmetals. It gives a detailed description of the various methods and their pros and cons.
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(2007). Powders, Fibers, Platelets, and Composites. In: Ceramic Materials. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-46271-4_20
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-46271-4_20
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