MECHANICAL ALLOYING OF HIGH MELTING-POINT INTERMETALLICS

We report on the synthesis of high melting point metal-metalloid intermetallics using mechanical alloying. For all of the over 50 binary systems containing iron, titanium, nickel, vanadium, tungsten, silicon, boron and carbon studied by us the intermetallic phases form via one of the four reaction channels: (1) direct formation of an intermetallic; (2) amorphous phase formation followed by annealing; (3) metastable nanostructure formation followed by annealing; or (4) fine mixture formation followed by annealing. In all of these cases annealing is performed at temperatures well below the melting point. These reaction paths are documented with X-ray diffractometry results.