CERAMIC PROCESSING OF NBC NANOMETRIC POWDERS OBTAINED BY HIGH ENERGY MILLING AND BY REACTIVE MILLING

Production of nanometric ceramic powders is one of the most recent advances in materials science. However the large scale production of some materials is still a challenge. There are two approaches to the fabrication of nanomaterials that results in powders with distinct characteristics. In high energy milling the particle size is reduced by mechanical forces to achieve nanosized particles. Another technique is reactive milling in which nanometric particles are synthesized by mechanically activated reactions. In this work NbC nanoparticles were produced by high energy milling of commercial NbC and by self sustained high energy reactive milling of Nb2O5-Al-C powder mixture. The NbC particles were desagglomerated for I h in a planetary mill. The obtained powders were characterized by X-ray diffraction, scanning electron microscopy and laser diffraction. The objective of this study was to compare the efficiency of two employed techniques to determine the most of producing nano-scale NbC.