Transparent Al2O3 fabricated by energy efficient spark plasma sintering

Spark plasma sintering (SPS) techniques have been intensively investigated for manufacturing of diverse materials. Numerous sintering methods have been researched to achieve a reduction of the sintering time, larger scale production, and significant energy savings. Usually, the traditional SPS methods need prohibitively high energy outputs to fabricate transparent ceramics. Previous studies showed that the SPS input power can be significantly decreased when an energy efficient configuration using a BN-coated graphite foils is used, but many samples obtained using this approach had cracks. The developed new thermally managed SPS (TM-SPS) results in the prevention of cracks, full densification, and uniform transparency in alumina. Furthermore, consumption is 17% lower in the developed new energy efficient SPS configuration compared to the traditional SPS configuration. Therefore, the developed TM- SPS method has potential for fabricating transparent ceramic of various materials with uniform transparency. A comprehensive three-dimensional fully coupled thermo-electro-mechanical finite element framework has been used for modeling the SPS with different energy configurations. [GRAPHICS] .