Sol-gel-based carbon/silicon carbide

The current paper describes a novel approach to produce C/SiC composites via a fast-sol-gel process. Tailorable organo-silane liquid precursors are reacted, to produce a resin-like sol within tens of minutes. Carbon-fibre preforms, impregnated with this sol, construct intermediate composites after curing a few hours. These composites are easily converted, via high-temperature high pressure pyrolysis, to the desired C/SiC composites. This facile route to high-performance materials offers not only more effective production and cheaper thereby, but also a highly versatile process: via simple modifications of the precursors, filters, preforms and pyrolysis program, one can meet a wide variety of performance demands by tailor-making novel varieties of the C/SiC. Manufacturing, characterisation, performance and possible applications of these composite-materials will be discussed, as well as their comparison with commercial ones. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.